Remember when the frontend didn't have it's own router and MVC framework? When productivity wasn't ground to a halt by a fragile spiderweb of dependencies? When server responses to browsers were HTML? In this talk, we'll discuss tools like htmx and Hotwire and how they give us a way to build modern feeling web applications from basic HTML responses. By leveraging web standards and the technical advances of browsers, we will reduce both the lines of code we need to write and the amount of knowledge needed to build a fullstack application. This talk isn't about providing a silver bullet solution, but it is a call to action to reexamine how we build things. If you feel like we've overcomplicated things and you're deploying lines of code instead of functionality, this talk is for you.