I* rewrote my jQuery autocomplete plugin as a zero-dependency ES6 library (with Vue, React & Svelte adapters)

Back in 2016, I published Flexdatalist — a jQuery plugin for autocomplete/datalist inputs. It quietly grew to 364 stars and 81 forks on GitHub, people, myself included, have been using it in production ever since. But jQuery in 2026? It was time for a rewrite. The problem The original plugin did a lot: remote and static data, multiple tags, result grouping, keyboard navigation, localStorage caching. It worked well, but it was ~2000 lines of jQuery spaghetti that I wrote when I was a less experienced developer. Every time someone opened an issue, I'd wince looking at the code. The rewrite had been on my mental backlog for years. I kept postponing it because the scope felt overwhelming — rewriting that much logic while preserving backward compatibility, keeping the same CSS class names, supporting the same data-* attribute API, and not breaking things for existing users. Enter Claude Code I decided to try using Claude Code (Anthropic's AI coding agent) as a pair-programming partner for t