The Web Is More Than Enough, by Paul Ford

Judgment

Teams deciding whether to keep a 3D library or let the model write plain JavaScript now have a concrete data point: Claude Opus 5.5 ported Simon Willison's Three.js scene to vanilla JS + WebGL, and the output grew from 77KB to 98KB while not being identical. Dropping the framework buys self-contained code at the cost of a bigger, less readable file.

Basis

Willison writes that a Hacker News comment convinced him to try building a Nudibranch-themed Fabergé Egg in Three.js; he then asked Claude (Opus 5.5 Medium, running in regular Claude Chat) to port it to vanilla JS in the same thread where it had built the original. The Three.js version is 77KB, the port is 98KB. They aren't identical — Willison points readers to the shared transcript for Claude's explanation, and admits "I don't fully understand why it differed." The mechanism matters for build decisions: the model can 3D-model in vanilla JS + WebGL without Three.js at all, so dependency choice becomes optional rather than forced. Willison's own read is mixed — he finds the Three.js code slightly easier to understand when eyeballing, but notes he rarely looks at the code for these 3D projects, so that readability loss "isn't a particularly big deal" to him.