Svelte changed things up at every single version so that's what you get. I've been a fan/hater since v1. For me Claude still tried to write "export let" for props even if I specify Svelte 5 at times.

DeepSeek Latest does a great job with Svelte/Kit apps if you want to use an open weight models

+1 for Wails mention: just discovered it recently which brought me to Svelte--couldn't be more impressed. Golang "backend" w/ a Svelte "frontend" to build desktop apps the fraction of the size of Electron is a killer imo.

Yes. We open sourced an SSG based off SvelteKit about a year ago and were starting building AI tooling and product workflows around it, https://statue.dev but have since mothballed it.

For most of 2024-2025 frontier models really struggled with Svelte 4 vs 5 compatibility issues. Some of the main contributors, to their credit, really put in a lot of work to create benchmarks/MCP/other tools to make AI better at using Svelte. Personally I am just not a fan of MCP and other tools like that at all, and decided I'd rather just use vanilla css/js for new projects.

Look at this; it's literally multiple times more expensive to have a model sifting through all this stuff in every context use them with a tool: https://svelte.dev/docs/ai/prompts/llms.txt All of these are input tokens and turns to gather context.

The "too niche to be a major training priority" dilemma is actually a really big problem that almost all new or emerging dev tools have now. Incumbents and category leaders are priorities and show up in major benchmarks, so models develop excellent tacit knowledge and capabilities with them and expose it everywhere all the time for "free" in their weights. Everything else is at a major disadvantage because models don't know about them, how to use them, how they work, what they're for/why, and every time you use them you pay a big capability and token hit because models only learn about them in-context.

I don't blame the Svelte team for this at all. There should be a better way for devtool projects to contribute to frontier labs training pipelines or properly posttrain their own agent coding models.

I would have said no different. I've always loved Svelte and the amazing dev-experience and perf was worth the smaller ecosystem. Models were very good at it, I was happy.

Then I got a model to one-shot a React+Shadcn project. It just knew what to do. Every detail was perfect. I couldn't find a single thing to complain about, I didn't chase any bugs.

I still think svelte is the better technology and developer experience (if you're coding by hand). But the React+LLM experience was amazing. Hoping models close the gap fully so I can stay w Svelte -- I do still like reading and tweaking the code.

Exact same. I was a huge user of SvelteKit from 2022 to early 2025. But ever since LLMs got good enough I went back to React, because the ecosystem size matters a lot more once the coding experience is automated away. And early models were much much better at React than they were at Svelte – I suspect that difference may be gone now but is there a good reason to switch back to Svelte?

i'd expect the fact that svelte doesn't have a shadow dom that gets recomputed all the time that it would be a significant performance and memory benefit for most apps. i'm not an expert though so idk if that's 100% accurate

In early 2026 I struggled a lot with models messing Svelte 4 and Svelte 5. I'm sure same thing will occur with load function vs remote functions, once they will be released

I’ve used both in vibe coded side projects, so the caveat is that it’s entirely personal use.

Opus 4.8+ did fine with SvelteKit and I didn’t notice much difference with token usage vs. React.

I will say that I have heavily prompted my agents to read current docs for all libraries, whether in their training set or not. So my agents read React docs even if their training set is full of React code.

yes! I learned React first, and then Svelte. Svelte seems to have all the benefits without any of the React abstractions that are more pain than they’re worth.

what's the point of svelte in a world where the llm is much better at react due to massively more available training data?

I do. I wrote on this extensively there – https://www.brachkow.com/notes/my-experience-with-svelte/

In short:

1. Svelte is a good framework, but most of the DX praise comes from React folk. In my experience, Svelte is less polished and less comfortable to work with than Vue.

2. The biggest problem with Vue is that your choice of SSR frameworks is limited to Nuxt, and Nuxt is, to put it mildly... not a good framework. It is full of reinventing the wheel, ambiguity, and foot guns. In my experience, I regretted every project I used Nuxt for.

As I needed good SSR, SvelteKit was a breeze: everything just renders on the server when I want it to, proper client/server separation, MVC-looking code.

3. Svelte has way lower adoption than Vue, not to mention React. So there are not many 3rd party libraries, and even important tools like Storybook or ESLint struggle with it.

It also tends to switch syntaxes a lot. Even this announcement contains a mention of switching from +page files to queries. This hurts AI usage a lot.

As a conclusion: A year ago, I would say that you should pick Svelte where SSR is critical, and stay on Vue for the rest. But as we have https://inertiajs.com/ right now, you can do SSR of any complexity in Vue + any backend you have.

God that's depressing. I would hope that this website hasn't lost all interest in coding because AI can do it now.

In the last 3 months svelte + kit have had 302 issues and 1,107 PRs opened (802 merged), 512 distinct humans opening/commenting/committing, and almost 100 unique code contributors. So yes, people care.

Svelte is faster and smaller on client devices than React is. If you care about user experience you should probably care, yes.

Time to ask the agent to spit out compiled wasm then if it doesn't matter.

For what it is worth, I care, if only for the simple fact that it is an interesting project.

Can you say more? I’ve been getting great results with Nuxt and Nuxt UI, and I’m having a hard time thinking of ways SvelteKit would be worth the switch.

They're effectively ready to use even if experimental; the migration path is typically pretty painless when features are stabilised and the codemods get you most of the way. There's a couple of missing features for them but if you don't need those then it's not a problem.

I've been using them in production for several months and zero issues. A few small workarounds here and there but otherwise they've been great.

I've had no problem using them in 2.x

What was used instead before ?

Needing bespoke svelte-specific tooling for _everything_ is pretty annoying when it comes to developer experience IMO. It is just overly custom when you could use something like solid and have similar performance but easy tooling integration due to just being typescript and tsx syntax. Like you can’t use typescript 7 right now in svelte, oxlint / oxfmt doesn’t fully support svelte either among other things like storybook’s mcp server not supporting svelte.