The are some very real costs to JavaScript frameworks. These frameworks do not exist to empower developers. They exist to:
* so that employers do not have to invest in training developers.
* to ease candidate selection at hiring, which greases the wheels of hiring/firing
In the big corporate world, especially at non-software companies, there is a culture that strongly believes internally written software sucks. This is Invented Here syndrome, and it reflects that internal developers cannot write software and employers will not invest in maintenance.
The larger costs there are human costs, the inability to efficiently solve any problem outside the constraints imposed by the framework.
Maybe in the much later stages of their lifecycle but probably most if not all JavaScript frameworks start to empower developers seeing as they are made by developers.
Would you mind elaborating? React[1][2], Angluar[3], and jQuery[4] all started as personal projects to abstract architecture for use by other people. These things started in an age of JavaScript years before TypeScript was imagined when writing large expansive architectures in JavaScript was a real risk. Full stack was not a thing yet and IE was still very real. However, most developers at the time were not writing large applications, at least not in this language. The primary concern for most developers was make things easy. I remember this was the intended selling point of AngularJS (first version) and it looked like garbage for Java developers.
Now if you have written your own applications nearly 60-80% of it executes outside the browser even when the only interface and use case is in the browser. The current common use case for these frameworks is that most developers cannot write original software and when they try they either fail, with plenty of face-saving excuses, or just create something that looks identical to their favorite framework. This is the primary problem these frameworks currently exist to solve for.
Their biggest plus, which some HN commenters baffingly either don't get or ignore, is that another company and volunteers pay for maintenance. If you roll your own - and you will, if you're not using one for a larger app! - you're now paying for library code and your money making application, thereby making less in total per hour spent.
> My goal here is not to write the end-all-be-all benchmark for “I’m a vibe-coder, which framework should I choose?” The point of this post is to demonstrate that it’s possible in the era of AI coding to still make decisions based on evidence rather than vibes.
But it’s obvious that the article will be understood as a useful benchmark, so author probably should have addressed that point earlier and more thoroughly.
Taking the authors pov for a moment, they just showed you how to put all your criticisms to work in making a newer better benchmark :)
Besides a rewrite to another framework using AI, another option is to modernize the framework with AI instead. Personally, I started to like Mithril after having worked with it for a few years. Instead of rewriting it to a better maintained alternative (mithril doesn't have much active development going on since 2015), I used agents to add signals, proper state management, typing, ssr, computed properties, Bun tooling and more to it. Thanks to the existing test suite, changes landed quite reliably. Source: https://code.garage44.eu/jeroen/mithril
There are also new minimalist frontend spa frameworks built from the ground up to be clean and simple and fast and easy for ai. E.g. https://arrow-js.com/
Yeah it's really enjoyable to be able to take old, stale dependencies, and simply make them into something great, typesafe, ESM, well tested etc, without having to change the whole codebase.
This benchmark is too simplified to be meaningful. The choice of a framework is rarely based on speed alone, it factors in other elements like the user's domain knowledge, long term maintainability and the framework's track record itself w.r.t security and development of features.
In this regard alone, it will make a lot of sense to spend extra $2 and 2 mins to trade off for a long-term maintainable codebase and code you can reason about than just something made quickly just to get it deployed fast.
In my personal use case, that would be Svelte 5 for me and I'm sure it will be something else for everyone.
It's also used on a dead simple app. These comparisons are almost always using apps no more complicated than to do apps, which is lightyears removed from actual commercial products
I have most of my apps in it without much trouble.
One of my recent ones had a very complicated form and state management.
AI really struggled with HTMX in that use case.
Like the form might work but the page would take 30s to load. Or some state would randomly drop or a toggle wouldn't work after changing a dependency.
If I rewrote that in react it would have one shot it without a doubt. Some things are just better models for different problems.
For the record I eventually got enough tests in place to keep the agent honest and the HTMX version is now a lot faster anything I could have got out of react but yeah, it was an adventure.
I think HTMX has a wall where it makes sense to pivot to something else. In your case I’d imagine using something like Svelte would get you the same speed benefit over React but without the extra work required to get the agent to cooperate.
I judge languages by how they look. JavaScript is a wall of const/async/await these days, which is ugly. Functionality aside (the APIs have gotten pretty decent), the language has gotten uglier. It used to be nice and nuanced even with boilerplate. Closures and prototype inheritance is neat. Walls of const are not. Does every enclosed function need a million consts for every expression?
Also, it’s a language where everything happens somewhere else. Not here and now, somewhere else on some other event. That sucks for the small stuff.
Async JavaScript using callbacks had a learning curve, but once you learned how to contain it and treat callback indentation as an opportunity to refactor it felt similar to coding in lisp.
The problem was the learning curve, and the fact you had to rewire your brain a bit compared to coding in something procedural.
Yes, I keep saying this. Async await is like loading spinners - a fix for a problem that shouldn't exist in the first place.
As much as possible should be happening locally, synchronously on the computer, in-process, or at least without yielding your thread context (and even then there are things like page faults which async/await wont save you from, they are 'invisible' to a regular developer).
While you might dismiss this idea, page faults used to be THE leading cause of delays back when hard drives were the norm.
That JS supports await isn't nearly as much a problem as the fact that it defensively defers execution any time it encounters one.
This hurts most badly for iterators.
Files are usually read from disks in chunks of 64K bytes. If you present the data as an async byte iterator you'll get 65,534 defensive deferrals, and one actual wait.
Of you have ten layers of transformation it will be 6,553,500 defensive deferrals and 10 real waits.
These defensive deferrals aren't so expensive in terms of CPU time, but they ARE very expensive in terms of wall clock time. All other work must be halted so the event loop code can run. Eventually synthetic deferrals dominate the wall clock cost of running the program. This isn't hypothetical either. Here's someone trying to build steam parsing on Node and finding that it's too slow to be useful: https://github.com/nodejs/node/issues/31979
It's astonishing to me that even after a decade of SPA frameworks, most authors don't understand how a browser engine like Chrome works. There's enormous cost of manipulating the DOM from JS, as HTML elements get bound to JS objects lazily.
An actual high performance framework should manipulate HTML as a string directly, or through HTML templates (another feature that has existed in most browsers for a decade).
If you're not building a complex application on top of the web stack (interestingly these increasingly use WASM and their own GUI frameworks, so another moot point), but building an interactive consumption website (scrollable lists of static contents), I'd say instead of fronted frameworks, what most people actually would need is Chrome's experimental declarative partial updates:
String manipulation for HTML is a great way to introduce security vulnerabilities.
WASM is a non-starter for most web applications due to initial binary download.
Advising to use some experimental feature in one browser does not seem like a great idea.
JavaScript frameworks are not perfect but they exist for good reasons. People that brush them away usually lack the experience and understanding on the topic.
I don't disagree or really have a dog in the fight for three out of your four points, but it's unfortunate that WASM gets such a bad rap. The blobs are large because popular compilers force the semantics of popular languages into the Turing tar pit. WASM binaries are pretty compact by design:
I don't understand how does manipulating html as string exactly makes anything better? wouldn't that cause for the whole page to just re-render with every small change?
There are server side frameworks that use web sockets so you can refresh small parts of a page and not the entire page. This involves smaller round trips from client browser to web server. In my opinion, for data intensive applications it makes more sense rather than REST APIs returning JSON payloads, parsing JSON into objects client side, and then update the DOM.
I think a lot of JS developers fail to recognize the variations of client systems power or people's usage patterns like how many tabs are open, how much GB of memory is their browser using, is the client machine paging out to disk, stuff like that. Not everyone is running a MacBook Pro so heavy client side JS apps tend to be "slow" to end users, at least perception.
that still doesn't answer the question, are you suggesting to maintain 1 giant string that represents the whole page whereby document.innerHTML is called everytime the string changes, or are you suggesting something else?
> There's enormous cost of manipulating the DOM from JS, as HTML elements get bound to JS objects lazily.
And yet, 95% of these "framework comparisons" and "anti-framework evangelists" build their opinions on examples that do little (if any!) dom manipulation after the initial rendering. Which is just not the reality of commercial products.
One size never fits all on the web. Although those references to elements can be costly they’re also valuable. If all you used was HTML string manipulation then event handling would be an utter nightmare. You’d have to make every event handler a global variable so you can specify it in onchange=“” callbacks and the like.
I’m the first to complain about the bloat of modern frameworks but stepping all the way back to HTML strings would be a total mess for anything relying on heavy interactivity.
this doesn't even benchmark anything really wrt user experience, so what does that have to do with the article?
the author measured near perfect scores on lighthouse across the board, which, i mean no surprise there?
then it has takes about payloads and ttfb, which is nearly meaningless without implementation details and one being an expert in each framework, imo.
are you just ranting about javascript in browsers because its accepted and articles like this become a place to welcome such without anyone caring about the topic?
> HTML templates (another feature that has existed in most browsers for a decade).
not really? browsers weren't even at the level of baseline a decade ago. microsoft edge on chromium is six years old.
They don't care. The big selling point besides being able to run on every platform is that users understand there is no reasonable expectation of quality when it comes to the web. If a desktop application freezes up and crashes, users will gnash their teeth and curse your name while they are pressing ctrl-alt-del and trying to get their system going again. A massive pile of react slop? Just shrug and refresh the page.
Imagine if you could ship your desktop app in a natively running virtual machine, that is as perfect as it gets from sandboxing code and running a lightning fast JIT compiler instead of virtualization. It delivers a common user experience, digital accessibility, endless customization while being secure, it's free for developers and users, constantly updated and it delivers an absurdly powerful, while also perfectly printable markup and styling engine.
It scores well here because Astro is for “content-driven websites” and that’s what the benchmark app was. I’d be curious how different the results would be if the app was highly interactive, with nontrivial realtime/async stuff going on etc.
Agreed. Go with solidstart (who just released a big V2 upgrade a few months back) if you want an extremely elegant solution to async, error handling and heavily concurrent behaviors.
Very easy to setup and way more readable than the equivalent React code.
And then you just use your favorite js framework with Astro and it will still be good. I use Astro with react and heroui a lot. Since the latter does not need any js for many components anymore you still get zero js builds unless you actually need interactivity.
Can confirm Astro is very very pleasant to use, and the escape hatches for when you do need something a bit more heavy hitting feel very well designed.
Divide the amount of revenue from the big AI companies by the total number of developers worldwide and you'll see that most are still mostly hand-coding despite what the megaphones on the internet say.
The overwhelming majority AI spend is being done by startups funded by venture capital.
Meanwhile, big companies have massively cut/capped AI spending at the exact time these companies need to triple prices to get any margins at all.
Perhaps dead internet theory applies more than normal to programming forums.
I enjoyed reading this article. I think it's an important article. Even though people might disagree about certain definitions like "maintainability," I liked what the author did by sticking to objective measurements which do correlate somewhat with the things we care about: Ability to implement the product fast, with few tokens and with as few lines of code as possible in the final product. These are well chosen metrics IMO.
Fewer lines of code (per piece of functionality) does, in fact, correlate strongly with maintainability. The downside of this metric to watch out for (as Goodhart's Law would have it) is to ensure that the framework isn't compromising (current or future) flexibility in an unacceptable way. I imagine if this kind of benchmark becomes popular, people would start coming up with low code frameworks which are extremely rigid and inflexible. Because rigidity is a good way to cut lines of code. There needs to be a way to ascertain the flexibility limits of the framework too.
Would be good to have a similar benchmark for a more complex application; one with authentication, access control (with individual ownership of records and group ownership).
Also would be good to compare the security of different frameworks in this way. See which frameworks leave security gaps. Would be good to set up a benchmark where an AI agent is made to impersonate different users (with different roles) and test access to all possible data types and views in an exhaustive way.
A while ago, I showed Claude a relatively complex application I had built with my framework https://saasufy.com/ and asked it to estimate how many lines of code and how long would be required to build the same application with a stack like React + Node.js + Postgres and it estimated that it would require 4 to 5 times the amount of code and amount of time so I'm keen to actually test it out with a benchmark like this.
I was not surprised that HTMX lead in a lot of the benchmarks. I suspect it would do even better with a more complex application. IMO, its design is closer in spirit to where the industry needs to go. There are a lot of maintainability and security gains to be had by standardizing frontend and backend interactions; though I believe there are other way to do this which can yield even more gains (though obviously with some tradeoffs depending on the use case).
This is true but its assessment did match my personal experience as a developer who has built quite a few apps with React + Node.js + Postgres combo. The project I had written with my framework was only about 1400 lines of code (mostly declarative HTML) and my experience is that applications of that complexity would normally approach or exceed 10k lines if well written with React/Node/Postgres. So its assessment even seemed conservative based on my own estimate.
I once also worked on a simpler application (feature-wise) for someone else which was approaching 100k lines but it was poorly architected with a lot of bad abstractions and over-engineered. In this case I could claim that my framework is cutting almost 99% of the code but that's comparing to the worst possible situation. Still, even that's not necessarily an unfair comparison because, in practice, a lot of real projects do end up bloated to such extent after a decade or so, likely even more so now with AI. Any framework which can prevent that bloat code from being generated is genuinely delivering long term benefits.
The whole reason for switching from server-side to SPAs and frameworks was increasing responsiveness for users, better transitions, and allowing optimistic updating.
All of these thing still matter no matter what you are coding with.
In typical HN style, you are both pretentious and wrong. Javascript frameworks save you the complexity of an agent holding the entire library code in their context. For example, an agent can work with 2-4 react components for a current ticket without needing to know each line of internal React code.
The vanilla advantage is also there in a pure client-side pwa. Arguably it’s even bigger, because the bundle size ends up way smaller and the agent needs to hold less in context.
Plus all the other vanilla advantages: fewer dependencies, lower maintenance, less retraining, etc…
I'm reading that agents can now mash up video games that were written in assembly. At that point I have to wonder if the abstractions are adding anything.
Of course, there is the question of "the human can still understand what is going on", but it's not clear the new frameworks are optimizing for that...
I mean maybe I'm too grumpy, but never in my life did I think I'd have to fight against a strong contingent of people who really don't see the value of abstraction. Taking crazy pills must feel like this.
They also were unnecessary even before AI, the biggest advantage of React over HTMX-style apps was that you could recruit someone more easily but the SPA complexity wasn't worth it and it scaled terribly.
Now that you don't write the code, I don't see why I would pick React style libraries unless the codebase is already there.
We just write different stuff. For content driven websites you can skip js frameworks altogether. For web apps it would not be a good idea.
It's all about how much interactivity you need. A lot of business web apps are full featured commercial software packed in SPA form. You will need a lot of stuff client side and without framework it will be a mess. Unless you write framework yourself but the you are reinventing a wheel.
The point of using a framework is to reduce mental load at expense of customizability. The moment you need to change something in the framework - this mental model falls apart.
Obvious solutions are to vendor your dependencies (compile the framework from owned source) or to drop to the lower level of abstraction.
LLMs should have no problem using browser/node APIs directly since they're very well used, well documented, and not changing as much as higher level software does.
Solid work, but it would be really cool if we can also test Pokemon motions and how the game responds in real-time. Is an agent able to think about reactions, directional movements and attack patterns of each Pokemon is where the real intelligence test lies.
Traditional languages may have their limitations, but [C++, Rust, JavaScript, TypeScript etc] can still do pretty well.
Just use plain HTML for God's sake. HN demonstrates very well that you can do plenty without some Javascript monstrosity. At the very least, make your your websites degrades gracefully when JS is turned off.
I really have no idea where comments like yours come from. I‘m baffled each time I read it. You must be really, really far removed from any commercial browser development process.
> At the very least, make your your websites degrades gracefully when JS is turned off.
I have noped out of so many sites that are - or should only be - serving simple content when I see the "please enable JavaScript" notice or site just plain breaks. It's so disappointing and irritating.
"do plenty" or just use React for everything and have a single thing where you don't need to worry about the limitations or having to remake the same stuff the framework provides?
When I was running a small dev agency with a sprinkling of web projects, Angular was useful because it every project looked more or less the same. The rigidity (and verbosity) it imposed was an advantage in this setting, as it helped with the cognitive load when switching between projects. Apart from that, I wasn’t a fan either.
Angular is an absolute joy to work with as a framework, improving year after years, not scared of shifting heavily when a new favorable paradigm comes in. You never had data to prove that angular sucks because all the benchmarks don't say so.
How's about no JS framework and just use the browser APIs? If you want token efficiency, that's the way to go. If you want web app efficiency, that's the way to go too. JS frameworks were always for the horde that does not do the homework, and the horde that wants to talk about it all day long rather than whatever the fuck is the purpose outside of this damn computer.
I mean it just seems like even in the agentic era, you should know when to use the right tool for the right job. The site shown seems perfect for htmx style websites, so idk why you would use an SPA. Still very cool experiment, appreciate the data and human writing!
my experience is that one-shotting a simple front end works great. Then you want to add features and move things around and each turn starts getting slower and the single page with JS and CSS and HTML starts to turn into a 3000 line monster and your context window starts to creak under the strain of even simple changes, because the LLM has to keep more and more of the application in its head just to make relatively small changes without breaking something else. Either you should have started with some kind of framework with hygienic rules on how to separate concerns or at minimum a good set of coding standards that force the LLM to start building clean components from scratch. The benefit isn't necessarily cleaner code for its own sake, it's that the LLM can work on one part of the application without having to understand the whole thing every time. That being said, once you have a 3000 line prototype it's not that complex to simply ask the LLM to refactor it into a set of orthogonal components. As long as it was building unit tests using playwright or something this can turn your slop into framework code cleanly. The interesting question is whether you saved anything by putting off that structure in the first place.
I run into this problem turning claude artifacts into things I might want to maintain longer term.
And a little research turns out that anthropic itself makes available a *react* based artifact builder so you don't end up with SLOP from the get go. You could probably modify the template to work with your framework of choice.
Now that IE is dead and most of the cross-platform implementation differences have been fixed, you are generally better off with vanilla JS instead of jQuery.
Unfortunately the author is not only correct about front end development vibes, but due to this state of affairs, I ceased to recognize browser based UIs as being software development at all. Too much browser tech is broken to call it software. As for agents, good for them!
* so that employers do not have to invest in training developers.
* to ease candidate selection at hiring, which greases the wheels of hiring/firing
In the big corporate world, especially at non-software companies, there is a culture that strongly believes internally written software sucks. This is Invented Here syndrome, and it reflects that internal developers cannot write software and employers will not invest in maintenance.
The larger costs there are human costs, the inability to efficiently solve any problem outside the constraints imposed by the framework.
[1] https://blog.risingstack.com/the-history-of-react-js-on-a-ti...
[2] https://medium.com/@sjarancio/reactjs-a-brief-history-3c1e96...
[3] https://medium.com/the-startup-lab-blog/the-history-of-angul...
[4] https://medium.com/@andrewchall92/how-jquery-was-born-a-brie...
Now if you have written your own applications nearly 60-80% of it executes outside the browser even when the only interface and use case is in the browser. The current common use case for these frameworks is that most developers cannot write original software and when they try they either fail, with plenty of face-saving excuses, or just create something that looks identical to their favorite framework. This is the primary problem these frameworks currently exist to solve for.
That's where most complo theories fail...
This is something that people who cannot live without frameworks often repeat, but its a fiction of their own creation.
It uses two 500-line libraries, one for using JSX syntax, and the other for MVC.
> My goal here is not to write the end-all-be-all benchmark for “I’m a vibe-coder, which framework should I choose?” The point of this post is to demonstrate that it’s possible in the era of AI coding to still make decisions based on evidence rather than vibes.
But it’s obvious that the article will be understood as a useful benchmark, so author probably should have addressed that point earlier and more thoroughly.
Taking the authors pov for a moment, they just showed you how to put all your criticisms to work in making a newer better benchmark :)
In this regard alone, it will make a lot of sense to spend extra $2 and 2 mins to trade off for a long-term maintainable codebase and code you can reason about than just something made quickly just to get it deployed fast.
In my personal use case, that would be Svelte 5 for me and I'm sure it will be something else for everyone.
I have most of my apps in it without much trouble.
One of my recent ones had a very complicated form and state management.
AI really struggled with HTMX in that use case.
Like the form might work but the page would take 30s to load. Or some state would randomly drop or a toggle wouldn't work after changing a dependency.
If I rewrote that in react it would have one shot it without a doubt. Some things are just better models for different problems.
For the record I eventually got enough tests in place to keep the agent honest and the HTMX version is now a lot faster anything I could have got out of react but yeah, it was an adventure.
Also, it’s a language where everything happens somewhere else. Not here and now, somewhere else on some other event. That sucks for the small stuff.
Async JavaScript using callbacks had a learning curve, but once you learned how to contain it and treat callback indentation as an opportunity to refactor it felt similar to coding in lisp.
The problem was the learning curve, and the fact you had to rewire your brain a bit compared to coding in something procedural.
I'm still sour why goto doesn't exist in javascript
As much as possible should be happening locally, synchronously on the computer, in-process, or at least without yielding your thread context (and even then there are things like page faults which async/await wont save you from, they are 'invisible' to a regular developer).
While you might dismiss this idea, page faults used to be THE leading cause of delays back when hard drives were the norm.
This hurts most badly for iterators.
Files are usually read from disks in chunks of 64K bytes. If you present the data as an async byte iterator you'll get 65,534 defensive deferrals, and one actual wait.
Of you have ten layers of transformation it will be 6,553,500 defensive deferrals and 10 real waits.
These defensive deferrals aren't so expensive in terms of CPU time, but they ARE very expensive in terms of wall clock time. All other work must be halted so the event loop code can run. Eventually synthetic deferrals dominate the wall clock cost of running the program. This isn't hypothetical either. Here's someone trying to build steam parsing on Node and finding that it's too slow to be useful: https://github.com/nodejs/node/issues/31979
The solution is stream iterators. They are sync when they can be and async when they must be: https://docs.bablr.org/architecture/spacetime
An actual high performance framework should manipulate HTML as a string directly, or through HTML templates (another feature that has existed in most browsers for a decade).
If you're not building a complex application on top of the web stack (interestingly these increasingly use WASM and their own GUI frameworks, so another moot point), but building an interactive consumption website (scrollable lists of static contents), I'd say instead of fronted frameworks, what most people actually would need is Chrome's experimental declarative partial updates:
https://developer.chrome.com/docs/web-platform/declarative-p...
Which basically stream HTML fragments from the web.
WASM is a non-starter for most web applications due to initial binary download.
Advising to use some experimental feature in one browser does not seem like a great idea.
JavaScript frameworks are not perfect but they exist for good reasons. People that brush them away usually lack the experience and understanding on the topic.
I think a lot of JS developers fail to recognize the variations of client systems power or people's usage patterns like how many tabs are open, how much GB of memory is their browser using, is the client machine paging out to disk, stuff like that. Not everyone is running a MacBook Pro so heavy client side JS apps tend to be "slow" to end users, at least perception.
And yet, 95% of these "framework comparisons" and "anti-framework evangelists" build their opinions on examples that do little (if any!) dom manipulation after the initial rendering. Which is just not the reality of commercial products.
I’m the first to complain about the bloat of modern frameworks but stepping all the way back to HTML strings would be a total mess for anything relying on heavy interactivity.
the author measured near perfect scores on lighthouse across the board, which, i mean no surprise there?
then it has takes about payloads and ttfb, which is nearly meaningless without implementation details and one being an expert in each framework, imo.
are you just ranting about javascript in browsers because its accepted and articles like this become a place to welcome such without anyone caring about the topic?
> HTML templates (another feature that has existed in most browsers for a decade).
not really? browsers weren't even at the level of baseline a decade ago. microsoft edge on chromium is six years old.
Imagine if you could ship your desktop app in a natively running virtual machine, that is as perfect as it gets from sandboxing code and running a lightning fast JIT compiler instead of virtualization. It delivers a common user experience, digital accessibility, endless customization while being secure, it's free for developers and users, constantly updated and it delivers an absurdly powerful, while also perfectly printable markup and styling engine.
That's what a browser is. Your apps are native.
Very easy to setup and way more readable than the equivalent React code.
Django?
I hope I'll be the last person on Earth writing code by hand.
The overwhelming majority AI spend is being done by startups funded by venture capital.
Meanwhile, big companies have massively cut/capped AI spending at the exact time these companies need to triple prices to get any margins at all.
Perhaps dead internet theory applies more than normal to programming forums.
Fewer lines of code (per piece of functionality) does, in fact, correlate strongly with maintainability. The downside of this metric to watch out for (as Goodhart's Law would have it) is to ensure that the framework isn't compromising (current or future) flexibility in an unacceptable way. I imagine if this kind of benchmark becomes popular, people would start coming up with low code frameworks which are extremely rigid and inflexible. Because rigidity is a good way to cut lines of code. There needs to be a way to ascertain the flexibility limits of the framework too.
Would be good to have a similar benchmark for a more complex application; one with authentication, access control (with individual ownership of records and group ownership).
Also would be good to compare the security of different frameworks in this way. See which frameworks leave security gaps. Would be good to set up a benchmark where an AI agent is made to impersonate different users (with different roles) and test access to all possible data types and views in an exhaustive way.
A while ago, I showed Claude a relatively complex application I had built with my framework https://saasufy.com/ and asked it to estimate how many lines of code and how long would be required to build the same application with a stack like React + Node.js + Postgres and it estimated that it would require 4 to 5 times the amount of code and amount of time so I'm keen to actually test it out with a benchmark like this.
I was not surprised that HTMX lead in a lot of the benchmarks. I suspect it would do even better with a more complex application. IMO, its design is closer in spirit to where the industry needs to go. There are a lot of maintainability and security gains to be had by standardizing frontend and backend interactions; though I believe there are other way to do this which can yield even more gains (though obviously with some tradeoffs depending on the use case).
I once also worked on a simpler application (feature-wise) for someone else which was approaching 100k lines but it was poorly architected with a lot of bad abstractions and over-engineered. In this case I could claim that my framework is cutting almost 99% of the code but that's comparing to the worst possible situation. Still, even that's not necessarily an unfair comparison because, in practice, a lot of real projects do end up bloated to such extent after a decade or so, likely even more so now with AI. Any framework which can prevent that bloat code from being generated is genuinely delivering long term benefits.
Server side page generation with a sprinkle of js will give you the same results with GBS less of packages and comple time
All of these thing still matter no matter what you are coding with.
Plus all the other vanilla advantages: fewer dependencies, lower maintenance, less retraining, etc…
Of course, there is the question of "the human can still understand what is going on", but it's not clear the new frameworks are optimizing for that...
Now that you don't write the code, I don't see why I would pick React style libraries unless the codebase is already there.
It's all about how much interactivity you need. A lot of business web apps are full featured commercial software packed in SPA form. You will need a lot of stuff client side and without framework it will be a mess. Unless you write framework yourself but the you are reinventing a wheel.
I think unless you have a very low number of features or employees (and are sure from the start to keep it this way) I don't see it working.
In my 3 previous companies I had similar issues so I think it's widespread.
Obvious solutions are to vendor your dependencies (compile the framework from owned source) or to drop to the lower level of abstraction.
LLMs should have no problem using browser/node APIs directly since they're very well used, well documented, and not changing as much as higher level software does.
Traditional languages may have their limitations, but [C++, Rust, JavaScript, TypeScript etc] can still do pretty well.
I have noped out of so many sites that are - or should only be - serving simple content when I see the "please enable JavaScript" notice or site just plain breaks. It's so disappointing and irritating.
and what % of users have JS turned off? 0.00001%?
The only feature that appears to require JavaScript is search.
If you aim to make small apps that don’t represent complex real-world applications you should not use Angular.
But blanket statements like yours are what I hate the most in software industry.
Not necessarily that Angular would win that, but I imagine that it would at least significantly shuffle the order.
I run into this problem turning claude artifacts into things I might want to maintain longer term.
https://github.com/anthropics/skills/blob/main/skills/web-ar...