That’s why I use Rails for work. But I also had to write a small Nodejs project (vite/react + express) recently for a private project, and it has a lot of nice things going for it that make modern frontend dev really easy - but boy is it time consuming to set up the basics.

I can't imagine having nice things to say about node after working in Rails. Rails does so much for you, provides a coherent picture of how things work. Node gives you nothing but the most irritating programming tools around

I thought node was great until I had to upgrade some projects, and then realizing that those frameworks maintainers never maintain their dependencies. While in the C world, lot of projects treat warnings as errors.

that's an indictment of the proliferation of shitty frameworks and documentation. it's not hard to figure out such a combination and then keep a template of it lying around for future projects. you don't have to reach for the latest and shiniest at the start of every project.

> you don't have to reach for the latest and shiniest at the start of every project.

Except you kind of do, because if you're working frontend or mobile, then your chosen non-shitty tech stack is probably lacking some Important Language Innovations or Security Featuers that Google or Microsoft forced on the industry since last time you worked with that stack.

(Yes, that's mostly just an indictment of the state of our industry.)

every time you capitulate, you tell them that you're happy to play along, bring more "innovation" so you keep having to run very hard just to stay in place.

I’ve been pretty happy with vite, chakra, and Postgrest lately

Half an hour is still an overestimation, most of these frontend tools go from 0 to hello world in a single CLI command.

On a good day, when you're using the most recent right version of MacOS, when all of the frontend tool's couple thousand dependencies isn't transiently incompatible with everything else, yes.

(If no, AI probably won't help you here either. Frontend stuff moves too fast, and there's too much of it. But then perhaps the AI model could tell you that the frontend tool you're using is a ridiculous overkill for your problem anyway.)

I'll be honest, I've never had the command line tool to setup a React / NextJS / Solid / Astro / Svelt / any framework app fail to make something that runs, ever

I had create-react-app break for me on the first try, because I managed to luck into some transient issue with dependencies.

What exactly magic command line tool are you referring to? What cmd tool configures the frontend framework to use a particular css framework, webpack to work with your backend endpoints properly, setups cors and authentication with the backend for development, configures the backend to point to and serve the spa?

dotnet new <the_template>

It takes me all of 5 minutes with Phoenix

Exactly, the idea that it would take a weekend seems crazy to me. It’s certainly not something I need AI for.

Yep, it will likely work and do what it's supposed to do. But what it's supposed to do is probably only 90% of what you want: try to do anything out of what the boilerplate is setup for and you're in for hours of pain. Want SWC instead of TSC? Eslint wasn't setup, or not like you want? Prettier isn't integrated with ESlint? You want Typescript project references? Something about ES modules vs CJS? Hours and hours and hours of pain.

I understand all this stuff better than the average (although not a top 10%), and I'd be ashamed to put a number of the amount of hours I've lost on setting up boilerplate _even_ having used some sort of official generator