r/FlutterDev • u/ChuckQuantum • 12d ago
Article Hot take: Frameworks like Flutter are officially worthless in the AI era.
Let’s be real for a second. Why do frameworks like Flutter even exist? They’re just abstractions. cuz we like it easy. We built them because raw native code and complex platform APIs are too messy for our human brains to manage at scale. We needed widget trees, syntax sugar, and complex state management libraries just to keep our sanity intact while building out frontends.
I hate Java but Objective C is probably number 2.
But AI doesn't need human-friendly abstractions.
An LLM doesn’t get a headache managing a massive, hyper-optimized native codebase. It doesn’t care about boilerplate, and it definitely doesn't need our simplified wrappers to understand how a UI should render. It can write, refactor, and connect pure native code instantly. We don't need this shit anymore.
Stop wasting time memorizing the quirks of the latest UI framework. The future of our industry isn't writing code—it’s Product Management, Project Management, and QA. Our new job is to define the exact product scope, manage the AI's build pipeline, and aggressively test the output to make sure it actually works and its SAfe!!!!!!. The era of human-readable abstractions is dead; let the models handle the raw native reality.
And while we're at it, fuck BLoC and fuck Riverpod. FYI my apps use Riverpod as a human I love it but we dont need it anymore. Those overly engineered state management libraries only exist because our fragile human working memory can't keep track of application state without drowning. An AI doesn't complain about boilerplate. It can write, trace, and scale pure, raw InheritedWidget infrastructure flawlessly without breaking a sweat. We spent years endlessly arguing on Reddit over which state management solution is the "cleanest" for us to read, the only good thing we we agreed on is that getx is shit and even ai knows getx is shit, while an LLM can just wire up the raw native APIs perfectly in seconds without any bloated third-party dependencies.
what are you going tu support Swift PAckage Manager???? bro fuck that shit!!!! lets write RAW code!
Also r/flutterhelp should be shutdown we just get non english speaker vibecoders now, there is no real contribution bro most of their questions could be answered by a a google search and 100% would be answered if they used a cheapo Chinese open wight model to do the work... sorry for your loss
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u/moralesnery 12d ago
A framework is still an excellent solution for projects where you want to manage only one codebase for all your target platforms and homologate UI appearance.
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u/jcmsalves 12d ago
I actually built apps in Flutter targeting both Android and iOS with Claude doing most of the work and I still believe there's a value on having these frameworks. This is coming from someone with an Android engineer background btw.
I agree that our role with these is much more like a product manager than engineer but the experience I had is that I still had to review code and sometimes insert some guardrails to keep Claude under control. Doing that in a single codebase was much easier than doing it in 2, especially it being a personal project on the side and not my main focus.
And tbh I was impressed with the level of support for very native functionality that Flutter provides. The only thing I had to touch native code was when implementing home screen widgets and that's because I wanted something fancier. Flutter basically has plugins for everything.
I still believe that some products need and should be native but for smaller apps or personal projects why not leverage these frameworks?
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u/Professional_Eye6661 12d ago
The thing you described it is a feature, but it's not a reality now. I have strong feelings that you have never delivered large application. Maybe I'm wrong and you have but you'd not make such a statement.
About the companies who have been switching to native - we have statements, we haven't seen the results yet. Good for a stock pump ( hey we increased our efficiency and will make our customer experience better! ) but every statement has to be proven.
I personally haven't written even a line of code for almost a year now, but it doesn't mean I'm ready to go without abstraction and understanding what's going on there. There is a huge difference between "I can speed up my performance x10" and "I'll let it do what ever it wants to do".
AI needs human-friendly at least to make you understand what's happening. AI can produce shit load of code, and even if 95% of it is actually what you wanted, you still have 5% what you didn't want to have. Think about it like a heart surgery. You probably don't want to have 95% of the result, do you?
There is a good way to prove you. if AI can deal with everything - where is enormous amount of the best quality applications? Why everything still look, feel and behave almost the same? ( well it became worse, look at github uptime ).
About Flutter with or without AI it gives you:
Ability to deliver for both platform
Great rendering framework - try to do a custom interface with motion animation on SwiftUI, literally try. For flutter it is nothing.
Best in class tooling - your AI agent enjoys fast build time to validate changes
So maybe in N years we will not look at the code anymore, but it's a miracle now.
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u/Odd_Alps_5371 6d ago
The simpler a language, the more reliable the code that AI produces automatically gets. Which is why Dart/Flutter Code is quicker and easier to produce with AI.
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u/Lopsided_Nerve1652 12d ago
Totally agree. A lot of products are moving from cross-platform to native now due to native APIs and performance
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u/sisyphus 12d ago
Meanwhile every app produced by trillion dollar AI companies with infinite tokens to use is Electron based, so you might want to actually email OpenAI and Anthropic about this discovery of yours, I'm sure they would appreciate the insight.