htmx

The migration moved interactivity toward server-rendered HTML with htmx rather than a large client application. That trade changes the boundary of the system more than it changes a library name.

The useful question from the thread is not whether React is bad. It is whether the product really needs a client-side state architecture before it needs simpler operations.

Tao's applets, which visualize Besicovitch sets and the honeycombs he co-designed with mathematician Allen Knutson, had stopped working on modern browsers entirely. An AI coding agent rewrote roughly two dozen of them in JavaScript, plus a new special-relativity sketchpad and a supplement for his recent Gilbreath conjecture paper.

Not everyone in the thread was charmed: one commenter said the more Tao talks about AI, the more he suspects an undisclosed conflict of interest, backed by a link to a Reddit thread.