To me this feels like true innovation in the space compared to other popular frameworks’ handling of async. In other frameworks it feels bolted on and with several gotchas; here it feels that it’s actually part of the framework. The new primitives are intuitive and they compose well, resulting in async-aware UI code that is more declarative. You get so many behaviors that you would have to manually account for in other frameworks for free.
What’s also interesting to me is that it seems like it’s colorless. Your async state is used just like any other synchronous signal state.
As much as I’m trying to understand what’s groundbreaking here, and I’m really trying to appreciate it, the prose style of the article makes it completely impenetrable. I’m trying to understand what makes Solid 2.0 special, but I’m coming up completely empty, because it feels like I’m just reading noise.
Maybe I just need to get over it, but this post reeks of Claude-isms and it immediately makes me stop caring about what the post has to say.
Obviously having an LLM write these kinds of things is the norm now, but what doesn't have to be the norm is the writing style. The way Claude (and other popular LLMs) write is so obnoxious and verbose. I think a simple pass of "make this more terse and to the point" would do wonders here.
As much as the content and tech behind it is really cool, and I appreciate Ryan's ideas it does seem like a shame to culminate so much work with a very "sloppy" finish
It was human written, fed to AI, human adjusted, re-fed, and around again — for days, with dozens of reviewers in between. (GPT 5.6 Sol doing the AI half of the lifting, for what it's worth.) So "nobody even looked at it" is the one criticism I can rule out. Everybody looked at it.
But you aren't wrong. The marketting heavy parts are where the tone shows. And honestly those are the parts I write worst. Exactly why I lean on AI there. When I ran before/after comparisons past reviewers, the polished versions kept winning. Maybe that's the norm creeping into how all of us write now. I notice it in my own sentences too. The words I choose. But given the choice between slightly synthetic and authentically clumsy, I tested both and shipped the one that read better.
Personally I don't think that a release announcement needs to be "marketing heavy" in the first place.
That's really the heart of the problem - in an effort to sound exciting, many parts of the article are just wasting the reader's time rather than simply explaining how things work clearly and directly.
To be clear I’m not making any statement or implication about Ryan’s work or his quality as a developer. As someone who knows nothing about Solid I’m trying to read the article and understand what the USP is and struggling. And remarking on the AI tells in the writing.
Hey, I want to say that I love Solid as an alternative to react. I've been using it for hobby projects for 5+ years.
I'm at least one example of someone who prefers authentically clumsy. Users like me will be less likely to give Solid a chance if they cannot see that there are real humans with a vision behind it.
The AI tone in the announcement is light enough to be barely noticeable, but it’s there. Note that posting AI-generated comments to HN is explicitly forbidden.
Anyone who has spoken to me knows I talk in run-on sentences. I never complete a thought without interrupting myself. And I write the way I talk. I used to heavily edit that out of my writing, but now AI uses the proper punctuation and fills in where I miss words. It's like what I hear in my head but better. Because it is grammatically sound.
After:
Anyone who's spoken to me knows I talk in run-on sentences. I never complete a thought without interrupting myself. And I write the way I talk. I used to spend whole editing passes beating that out of my drafts. Now AI handles the punctuation and fills in the words I skip. It's what I hear in my head, but grammatically sound.
The result is almost always terser, more clear, and to the point. And usually all it takes is one more pass over to adjust anything I wouldn't say. In this case I kept the after verbatim just to illustrate my point.
I keep wondering if the next step of Ryan should be to raise this a step further and bring it to anything-ui, not just the web. It's obviously a step forward, but that step could be mean a lot more than it really seems to be.
Yeah, like solid-universal (lets you target non-dom environments, state being derived and computed as little as possible, never again a glitch or disagreement because theres nothing to sync)
To be fair the writing has been on the wall for years for those paying attention. I never believed in Metaframeworks and it was this sort of awkward truth we had to deal with because the technology wasn't where it needed to be.
SolidStart 2.0 has a very important role of moving current projects into the future. Better tooling was key and it was that rewrite work that allowed me to hoist relevant parts into the core. Now every Solid project benefits from no FOUC in dev, preloading tag emission during SSR streaming etc...
I think this is inevitable collapse with AI. We want to look for our tools in a single place. It doesn't have to differentiate between React and Next when React is the one actually providing the features.
Aside, what sort of blog post content are you looking for?
To me this feels like true innovation in the space compared to other popular frameworks’ handling of async. In other frameworks it feels bolted on and with several gotchas; here it feels that it’s actually part of the framework. The new primitives are intuitive and they compose well, resulting in async-aware UI code that is more declarative. You get so many behaviors that you would have to manually account for in other frameworks for free.
What’s also interesting to me is that it seems like it’s colorless. Your async state is used just like any other synchronous signal state.
Really excited to start playing with it!
As much as I’m trying to understand what’s groundbreaking here, and I’m really trying to appreciate it, the prose style of the article makes it completely impenetrable. I’m trying to understand what makes Solid 2.0 special, but I’m coming up completely empty, because it feels like I’m just reading noise.
I wrote an article on this. Maybe it helps? https://www.brenelz.com/posts/innovations-of-solid-2/
Maybe I just need to get over it, but this post reeks of Claude-isms and it immediately makes me stop caring about what the post has to say.
Obviously having an LLM write these kinds of things is the norm now, but what doesn't have to be the norm is the writing style. The way Claude (and other popular LLMs) write is so obnoxious and verbose. I think a simple pass of "make this more terse and to the point" would do wonders here.
As much as the content and tech behind it is really cool, and I appreciate Ryan's ideas it does seem like a shame to culminate so much work with a very "sloppy" finish
Is Claude really this bad, though?
E.g. "The problem that never went away was async. Every framework, including ours, treated it as a condition that happened to it."
Async treated as a condition?
And a condition happens?
And on grammar, the second it is ... the framework??
I rather suspect this is second-order output. Writings of a brain rotted by "AI".
Shame, because enough of the message gets through the fog to tell me the whole message would be worth receiving. I wish the project every success.
It was human written, fed to AI, human adjusted, re-fed, and around again — for days, with dozens of reviewers in between. (GPT 5.6 Sol doing the AI half of the lifting, for what it's worth.) So "nobody even looked at it" is the one criticism I can rule out. Everybody looked at it.
But you aren't wrong. The marketting heavy parts are where the tone shows. And honestly those are the parts I write worst. Exactly why I lean on AI there. When I ran before/after comparisons past reviewers, the polished versions kept winning. Maybe that's the norm creeping into how all of us write now. I notice it in my own sentences too. The words I choose. But given the choice between slightly synthetic and authentically clumsy, I tested both and shipped the one that read better.
Personally I don't think that a release announcement needs to be "marketing heavy" in the first place.
That's really the heart of the problem - in an effort to sound exciting, many parts of the article are just wasting the reader's time rather than simply explaining how things work clearly and directly.
Out of curiosity, did you use AI for this reply too? It reads a bit like it.
Ryan has given so much to this community... perhaps he gives too much.
To be clear I’m not making any statement or implication about Ryan’s work or his quality as a developer. As someone who knows nothing about Solid I’m trying to read the article and understand what the USP is and struggling. And remarking on the AI tells in the writing.
AI knows how to spell “marketting”.
Hey, I want to say that I love Solid as an alternative to react. I've been using it for hobby projects for 5+ years.
I'm at least one example of someone who prefers authentically clumsy. Users like me will be less likely to give Solid a chance if they cannot see that there are real humans with a vision behind it.
> ... I tested both and shipped the one that read better
And there we have it. "AI"s prime use case. Best instead of good enough.
> And honestly
:)
The AI tone in the announcement is light enough to be barely noticeable, but it’s there. Note that posting AI-generated comments to HN is explicitly forbidden.
Before:
Anyone who has spoken to me knows I talk in run-on sentences. I never complete a thought without interrupting myself. And I write the way I talk. I used to heavily edit that out of my writing, but now AI uses the proper punctuation and fills in where I miss words. It's like what I hear in my head but better. Because it is grammatically sound.
After:
Anyone who's spoken to me knows I talk in run-on sentences. I never complete a thought without interrupting myself. And I write the way I talk. I used to spend whole editing passes beating that out of my drafts. Now AI handles the punctuation and fills in the words I skip. It's what I hear in my head, but grammatically sound.
The result is almost always terser, more clear, and to the point. And usually all it takes is one more pass over to adjust anything I wouldn't say. In this case I kept the after verbatim just to illustrate my point.
I prefer the former version. It sounds like a human.
I keep wondering if the next step of Ryan should be to raise this a step further and bring it to anything-ui, not just the web. It's obviously a step forward, but that step could be mean a lot more than it really seems to be.
@solidjs/web is already neatly separated, so there is space for other targets.
Yeah, like solid-universal (lets you target non-dom environments, state being derived and computed as little as possible, never again a glitch or disagreement because theres nothing to sync)
SolidStart 2.0 was just announced a week ago and immediately placed into maintenance mode. That's an interesting move.
I just hoped that announcement would be another blog post.
To be fair the writing has been on the wall for years for those paying attention. I never believed in Metaframeworks and it was this sort of awkward truth we had to deal with because the technology wasn't where it needed to be.
SolidStart 2.0 has a very important role of moving current projects into the future. Better tooling was key and it was that rewrite work that allowed me to hoist relevant parts into the core. Now every Solid project benefits from no FOUC in dev, preloading tag emission during SSR streaming etc...
I think this is inevitable collapse with AI. We want to look for our tools in a single place. It doesn't have to differentiate between React and Next when React is the one actually providing the features.
Aside, what sort of blog post content are you looking for?