React, Meta, and AI: Design or Coincidence?

React, Meta, and AI: Design or Coincidence?

I finally get why React smashed JS, CSS, and HTML into one weird component file. Not because developers love it—but because AI does. It's way easier for an AI to generate one self-contained component than to juggle 3 files and contexts.

And guess what? Meta (then Facebook) launched both FAIR (its AI lab) and React back in 2013. 12 years later, AI + React feel less like coincidence and more like design.

Component-based architecture wasn't just about developer productivity. It was about creating a structure that machines could understand and generate. Whether that was intentional or emergent doesn't really matter. The outcome is the same: React became the perfect substrate for AI-generated code.

This raises an interesting question about other technologies. How many "developer-friendly" tools were actually optimized for machine generation? And how many design decisions that seemed arbitrary at the time now make perfect sense in the context of AI?