I've always been a fan and supporter of HTMX, but lately I've wondered how beneficial it is now that LLMs can generate JavaScript for us. HTMX was especially useful when I wrote JavaScript by hand because I appreciated its higher level of abstraction and simplicity. I also struggled to make it work with AlpineJS and eventually had to resort to plain JavaScript, which gave me finer control. Normally, switching to JavaScript would have been a hassle but since an LLM can produce it as easily as any other text, I’m less clear on HTMX’s advantage. I’ve been getting along fine without it. If computers didn’t write code for us, I would still choose HTMX, but now I find it hard to justify the trade‑off.
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.
I think, at least for the next few years, certain preferences and consensuses were accidentally embedded in the models to your benefit.
They love htmx! Claude will independently suggest using it instead of more general js frameworks for smaller projects. A gpt model told me, and I wrote this down because it was striking, "htmx won the argument it was making."
It's the same thing with rust. I'm an ocaml expert and ocaml genuinely fits a lot of the problems I work with better regardless of that. But because of when the models were trained and what they were trained on, a certain sort of alt-consensus opinion is frozen into them, and it believes rust is a better choice for nearly everything!
I think you're good for the next few years at least. It's an open question what happens after that dead internet theory recursive loop of llms trained on llm output etc so who knows you might be good forever.
We will see. Changing things around a bit (especially flipping attribute inheritance to explicit by default) may confuse a lot of models. Oh well, it's the right thing ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Please don’t misunderstand my comment, I wasn't trying to diminish the brilliant work you’ve done on HTMX, which I’ve personally benefited from. I could have probably worded it better than I did. I'm also not saying you _did_ misunderstand it, only asking that you please don't. I was just sharing an observation that I realize is not everyone’s experience. I’m still a fan + supporter, even though I now reach for JS more often because the pain of writing it has largely disappeared. I’m still not a fan of it by any means, but LLMs have been a major mitigator. I'm always happy to see the HTMX updates when they come out.
It may do the opposite! My sense of LLMs is that simplicity beats training.
If you have 1/5th the context to consume, that's going to generate better code than the comparable typescript, even if the language is an esoteric one.
I've yet to see anyone try to finetune one of these qwen models on a specific framework, but if you guys care, qwen3.5-35B-A3B is rather fast and reliable for a lot of what I'd call "copy/paste" task and might be worth while to see if a fine tune could excel at HTMX universe tasks.
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.
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.
I recently used Alpine.js (client-side, I know), and, as a person that does backend most of the time and is not super knowledgeable in frontend, I was amazed.
I think that, combined with Htmx it can be a really powerful thing for lots of deployments (basically most things that do not need API/Json talking).
Depends how you set it up. Like any other project I guess. Funny enough, if you are able to produce maintainable code with an llm you could aswell lead a team of humans. LLMs shift your focus on project management and architectural choices.
I let the llm write components which are independent to each other. This works great and keeps everything clean. The times that llm would only generate unmaintainable code are long gone with OPUS, Fable and sol 5.6
> LLMs shift your focus on project management and architectural choices.
And a comfortable sense of short term productivity that make you tend to ignore the middle and long-term trade-offs.
It is unmaintainable unless you create a very modular architecture (read here: modules written by LLMs that will not get in the middle of others bc of their extra fat).
And even with a modular architecture, I am not convinced.
However I had a couple of success stories in the generative area, maybe bc I am so stupid that I do not detect the problems: SQL query/code generation and frontend Alpine.js-based for a small website.
Also good for one-off scripts.
But when it is about a project where you iterate for weeks, things get out of hand.
As a powerful search engine, exploring alternative solutions or doing code review, great. But the reason is not that it is extremely good at it. It is bc it is extremely fast at it and it is easy to recognize bogus stuff if you have been doing this for many years, so it saves you time. But still gives you inaccurate stuff.
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?
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
apologies, i thought you were saying you were switching to SPAs because LLMs understand it better. I see some version of that comment nearly daily now. Carry on!
