Benchmark post reaches Hacker News front page after repeated reposts
2 Nov 1 1:06 AM · 10d ago · 1 article · 4 posts · 3 sources · development 2 of 2
After multiple earlier submission attempts on Hacker News and Lobsters between Oct 28 and Oct 31 drew little attention, a new submission by user luu reached the HN front page on Nov 1, picking up a higher score and comments, with bot accounts relaying it on Mastodon shortly after.
“One thing I learned from this experiment is that everything I'm measuring is very stochastic.”
Nolan LawsonNolan Lawson Web developer and bloggerAlex Russell Web engineer cited in the postBaldur Bjarnason Commentator cited in the post
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2 outlets The AI cost of JavaScript frameworks
first by HN Best, 10d ago · also HN Frontpage
What people said 24 voices · best of 45 · verbatim
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AI cost of using anything is a good yard stick to measure things by. Red flags are a high degree of verbosity in tool outputs, complex failure modes, and slow running tools. Basically all that results in AIs having to look and dig through more output (tokens) and spend a lot of time polling tools for readiness (more tokens). The more complex a…
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IMO, the largest benefit of most JS frameworks is a great story for statee synchronization.Imagine an e-commerce website that has a cart with some products. The site has a cart button showing the current total, a pop-up cart interface, as well as an assortment of 10 or 20 different components which let you add or remove products (E.G. the…
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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…
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This just scratches the surface of the cost-benefit analysis of JS frameworks. Frameworks were built mostly to simplify state mangement as we moved to complex apps from web forms, as they simplify partial loading/state updates.The formula has changed significantly with LLMs. Managing state is still an architectural concern but not necessarily a…
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Kinda interesting, but disjoint from all the real underlying reasons why React and other frameworks are so sticky.After a decade of React, I'm not going to go go learn htmx or any other marginally better same-shaped tool for a new project, especially when it'd degrade my ability to review and debug another actor's work product. The cost of…
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> People would take the promotional talk of some SDK as truth without ever measuring and then being confused on why the whole app was slowThis has largely been my experience navigating the JS framework world from basically the beginning of React. It's wild how poorly some of the earliest presentations about React have aged, as that framework has…
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Weirdly, this underscores my personal non-AI experience of Nuxt, which is that it is almost easier than you'd like it to be.I'd prefer not to have used Nuxt for front-ends that don't need it, because it's chunky and a greater migration burden, but once a couple of patterns are in place, it's actually rather fun to use. A bit too much fun.Also it's…
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i've genuinely been curious about this as well, recently instead of prescribing next, since its the framework i was most comfy w, i let the agent decide a stackit chose plain solid wo a frameworks since i wanted the backend in rust anyway.the rationale was streaming ai responses is better in it, since react re-diffs the dom every time a token is…
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> These frameworks do not exist to empower developersI don't think we should discount the overhead that goes into making a component system with state management, and how much that simplifies application design as it allows you just to focus on data flow. The leap from a render function with a declarative dom DSL to something with state management…
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This experiment could be reframed as: which framework's abstractions are best suited to building "the Pokémon app."The results might differ if you were building Facebook, or Instagram, or X, or a static web page for the local coffee shop ...There will always be trade-offs, but tailoring your abstractions to the project is usually a better decision…
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> One of my pet peeves with the web development community is that so many of the decisions we make are vibes-based. ... All of this breathless boasting is usually offered with zero evidenceAI aside, this is something that bothered me a lot when I was forced to migrate from pure native mobile (swift) to React Native.People would take the…
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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/firingIn the big corporate world, especially at non-software companies, there is a…
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> so that employers do not have to invest in training developers.This does not make sense to me. What do you classify as employer here? Front end frameworks are usually pushed by developers, not management. If it were I suppose we would be seeing way less react and more vanilla with jquery on forms and normal website stuff.The push to create a SPA…
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HTMX is interesting.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…
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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…
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> Its as easy as letting the agent choose it's way of doing things - let it choose its own project framework be it Astro, using bun, using handlebars even.I would be very surprised if the tool that agents use most effectively is also the one they recommend. There's no clear reason why they'd be the same, until articles like this, neither they nor…
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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…
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This is what I was thinking while doing some work on my projects. I've been a full stack focused developer way before the AI age and at that time DX was something that was a priority for me.But now, its just about AX (Agent experience lol) how easy can you make it for the agentic system/model to achieve better outcomes. Its as easy as letting the…
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IMO the largest true value of the frameworks (and languages to some extent) is how they help long-running projects with many people coming and going. The most valuable trait was not what framework allowed, but what framework disallowed, preventing foot guns. E.g. Java got popular because it forced everyone to code similarly, at least more similar…
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This is buried at the end.> 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…
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I’ve been really impressed with the current frontier models’ capabilities to build native macOS/iOS apps. I’ve had Claude build native apps which I would have built as web apps not long ago.Also, when I first started out building with AI I made sure it would use frameworks and programming languages I know. Now I don’t care at all and let it choose…
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I've found myself reaching for HTMX or Hotwire/TurboStream lately and it had nothing to do with vibe coding.I find that HTML first web frameworks make way more sense, works out the gate, allows for caching of key parts easily and forces me to think in simpler terms when it comes to implementations. The end result is usually an easier to use app…
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The impact of framework/tech-stack mostly reveals itself, once the project is big. For small/medium projects you might not notice.> a culture that strongly believes internally written software sucks. This is Invented Here syndromeIt's the inverted invented here syndrome ;)But it is oh, so true. Entirely, unsurprisingly -- an internal software…
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I just used Astro yesterday for a static website I am deploying to cloudflare pages. I must say I was really impressed by the whole experience! From claude being super fast and diligent to the site structure being “decent” for the tokens and effort spent on it.If anyone interested here is the source code all done by Opus 5.5
All 2 developments of Nolan Lawson benchmarks how AI agents build the same app… →
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