Vite: speed that's actually fun

There's a moment when a tool isn't just faster but changes the feeling of the work itself. For me, that was Vite. With version 2, which has just been released, the development server starts practically instantly — and suddenly building things is fun again.

Why it's so fast

Classic bundlers like Webpack pack the entire application together before every start. On large projects you sit and wait. Vite flips the principle: it serves your source code to the browser directly through native ES module imports.

The browser only loads the modules it actually needs for the current page. No upfront bundling, no waiting. Dependencies like React are prepared once with esbuild — and esbuild is written in Go, which makes it orders of magnitude faster than bundlers written in JavaScript.

When the server starts in milliseconds, you stop thinking in "build and test" and simply think in doing.

Feedback in real time

The real win lies in Hot Module Replacement. I change a color in a shader or the spacing in a layout — and I see the result before I've even lifted my eyes from the code to the preview. That immediacy is more than convenience.

For creative work, the length of the feedback loop is everything. Every second of waiting is a small interruption in which the idea fades. When feedback arrives instantly, I can experiment, discard, and try again without losing the thread. Sluggish iteration turns into a conversation with the material.

My takeaway

Vite doesn't solve a problem that was previously unsolvable — Webpack ultimately builds the same applications. But it takes the friction out of the everyday, and friction is the quiet enemy of creativity. When the tool stops drawing attention to itself, more attention is left for what truly matters: the design itself.

Over the past weeks I've migrated several smaller projects, and the first seconds after npm run dev were a small sigh of relief every time. Speed isn't an end in itself — but when it feels like this, it becomes part of the pleasure.