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Given the number of people claiming to be CEO of HTMX, I have to ask: what’s the joke I’m missing?

> I really like htmx

> Full Disclosure, I am CEO of HTMX

i think you've found a good job!

Agreed.

In fact, I find Django and Postgres to be the best solution for htmx but Go stack is probably almost as good in terms of developer velocity and obviously much faster. So I think that's a good solution.

You can really build powerful production apps with htmx, and what people underestimate is how good it is with AI assisted development (Claude understands it and does it well, and if any JS glue logic on a specific template is required, it's pretty well written and not a mess).

I call it the GOSH stack (Go Sqlite Htmx) but HUGS is good too.

i use this stack quite a bit too. i made the claude do some load bearing 360 backflips, gate and seam a whole buncha smoking guns, and bolt go-starlark on top of this so i can just declare little web apps like its streamlit but it doesn't feel sucky like streamlit. i get to just write little blurbs of python-looking code and i get these fully reactive tools. probably my favorite and most used abstraction that came from too much wine and lazy boredom. also built stupid simple framework ish coverage for connections and duckdb and a few other things.

Oh wow, interesting combo that I would never independently reach for, but thanks to your template I might have to give it a whirl!

If you want a prototype fast, don't you use an LLM?

And if you do, why start with a simpler framework?

I also like the same stack, as it plays very well with a terminal focus workflow.

I agree. We are moving away from HTMX at work, to React. (After we moved away from Angular. That was…a choice…that I didn’t make.)

Here’s the thing: there’s still a place for HTMX. Lots of places. But “building an SPA but not actually and SPA” is not a lane for HTMX. Nor do they promote HTMX for that purpose. Really quite the opposite.

Different tools for different jobs. (Me? I honestly love React, just a more minimal stack. Zustand and TanStack and Vite. No Redux or Next.JS)

There are an army of people using SPAs for problems best served by a simple and more traditional website. It has been a thing since SPAs started showing up so you have a whole generation who think that Next.js is just how you build for the web.

Then HTMX is to them what the micro-ORMs were for me (and, if you've been in .Net for a couple of decades, I suspect you too).

> ... managing state on the server is not fun at all.

Do you not have a database for your backend? Managing state is kind of their thing.

> managing state on the server is not fun at all.

Really? I've never found that difficult. Sessions exist, URL parameters exist... Perhaps in a complex SPA you can have trouble, but so many of the "applications" I've worked on are just glorified documents.

> mixing presentation concerns with business-logic

That's on you not on your platform

I'll shill datastar for a second, there's barely a notion of frontend state management if you treat HTML as a projection surface with interactivity. I'd argue HTML is the most efficient wire format for interactive web apps, especially with streaming + compression.

Seriously DB->json->client->toHtml

DB->toHtml->client

Just imagine if that html wire format also conveyed the interactivity too and you eliminate the issues. And you can always seperate whatever concerns you want in whatever tpl lang of your choice.

Also htmx 4 is kinda just an worse datastar funnily enough In it's own way.

great library, we link to it on our alternatives page

What about vibe coding makes HTMX something that you speak about in the past tense? Are you just generating frontends in vanilla JS now?

As fellow CEO of HTMX, I approve of this statement and concur. I think our next major moves will be to monetize our assets [0].

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GyV_UG60dD4

> Like it or not, a lot of people are using LLMs and we are providing the following skills files for

For what? Don't leave us hanging!

Well, if someone is going to vibe code they don't have enough background on searching a good tool. They'll just ask LLM and LLM defaults to a Javascript based thing

oh man that's embarassing, someone made that on twitter I didn't realize it was from omarchy, I've removed it, my bad

I think that's the joke

Thinking about how well your web architecture will hold up for 100 years (or even 10 years) is bikeshedding and a pointless exercise.

Perfect is the enemy of good and all that. If something is useful, it’s possible to fix the architecture later. The only counter-example I know of has been GitHub, which was built on RoR and so poorly planned that it’s still biting Microsoft on a regular basis.

By default LLMs will start creating a tangled hard to test mess of javascript. But if you ask them to do TDD they will, and if you give them access to Playwright and have them write playwright tests this can all work.

The advantage for the LLM is the same for humans. With the right abstractions, code can be written quicker and more robustly.

To get more hands off with LLMS you really want to have a lot of engineering rigor. A big part of that is a focus on tests. If your abstractions make testing easier, your results will be a lot better. For Javascript the more you can test logic without DOM manipulation and without playwright tests, the better.

I found LLMs to be default to and be pretty good at working with HTMX, but not great (mostly lots of state synchronization issues). The focus on DOM markup of HTMX does not lend itself well to simplifying testing. I don't claim to be an expert at HTMX, but I don't see a separate section on testing in their documentation.

I am trying out the foldkit framework because it makes a lot more testable outside the DOM. Its probably too heavy weight for most humans (and for simple apps- it only seems appropriate for client-side apps), but I will see how well LLMs can work with it.

There's definitely something to this: I expect LLMs to hurt the adoption of htmx and most smaller web libraries. That's fine: it's always been a labor of love and is BSD 0, so I hope the ideas are interesting and that the people who decide to use it enjoy it.

The main issue HTMX address is reducing complexity and LLMs doesn't solve it.

I'd expect it to be the other way around: LLMs will increase HTMX(and similar solutions) adoption because alongside of being excellent at writing HTMX there are also excellent writing web components.

React, vue and similar still have their use case, but htmx + web components can drive you really far.

Out of curiosity, are you defaulting to vanilla js in your agentic dev stack? Or do you have the llm use a framework like react?

Does HTMX not have some performance gain over JS frameworks? (Never used it before)

> now that LLMs can generate JavaScript for us.

You mean generate unmaintainable JavaScript for us.

The last time I made a website about a year ago, Gemini used HTMX. It was actually my first experience with HTMX, so in a way, LLMs led to me adopting it. :D

It's hard to answer because I don't personally use HTMX as a way to avoid Javascript. HTMX is a Javascript library. And I don't know if I even find using HTMX easier/harder than writing JS, because they are fundamentally different approaches to building apps. It really just depends on what I'm trying to do.

One is a programming language used for writing client side code, and the other is a minimal library that makes server sent documents more ergonomic. Yes, it's a JS library with a few nice conveniences, but the main draw of HTMX encourages a completely different app architecture than what the average dev would arrive at with plain JS.

They're just two different things to me, and so it seems irrelevant if LLMs can help you write one faster. If you're only using HTMX to avoid JS, I don't see how LLMs discourage you from doing that. Wouldn't it be better to vibecode something you have an easier time reading than vibecode a language you don't even understand enough to use? What are you going to do if it blows up?

I mean, htmx and JS glue logic is truly the differentiator now because LLM's do it so well. It's absolutely the way to go.

the browser is and always will be built for dealing with SSR HTML

As a joke. Back when 2 came out, they promised there would never be a version 3. I.e., no breaking changes. Then they realized they did need to make a breaking change, so the only way to be true to their promise was to skip version 3.

Exponential versioning. Next major would be 8.

Carson promised they'd never do a version 3...but he never said they couldn't do a version 4.

htmx is based on the ideas of hypermedia, you can read the first chapter in our book on the topic here:

https://hypermedia.systems/hypermedia-a-reintroduction/

HTMX is a layer on top of server-side rendered HTML that gives you near-SPA-levels of interactivity without having to build a standalone SPA.

HTMX is a polar opposite to Angular in terms of complexity, for one.

I would classify HTMX as a different style of "SSR with tiny bits of JS on top." In fact, I would argue it is a more "pure" form of SSR-based interactive web development than an Alpine.js-style approach (I am not making any value judgment here).

You can use ReScript with Htmx (or anything else) and get no runtime errors. It has a sound type system, great language.

https://x.com/htmx_org/status/2093371471817244711

40 series landcruiser

Yep, fixed