Vite: The Modern Contract

A Different Question

Pipeline-based tools asked:

“How do we process files?”

Modern tooling asks a different question:

“How do we run front-end development?”

That shift changes everything.

Vite is not a collection of build steps.

It is a development platform.

Instead of defining pipelines, Vite provides:

All from a single foundation.

One of the biggest mental shifts Vite introduces:

Your app starts at index.html.

Not a config file.
Not a build script.

The browser loads HTML.
Everything else flows from there.

This aligns tooling with how the web actually works.

Modern browsers support ES modules.

Vite takes advantage of that:

You edit a file. The browser reloads instantly.

No pipeline required.

With Vite, development and build are separate phases.

This eliminates the slow feedback loops of pipeline-based tools.

Where Gulp required glue code, Vite uses plugins.

Each plugin:

Tailwind. Sass. TypeScript.

They all plug into the same contract.

React. Vue. Svelte. Astro.

They didn’t choose Vite because it was trendy.

They chose it because:

The platform fades into the background.

Vite replaces:

Not by doing more —
but by doing less, better.

It becomes the ground everything else stands on.

Vite feels simple on the surface.

Next, we’ll peek just enough under the hood to understand why it feels that way — without falling into config rabbit holes.