I’ve been a fan of this philosophy since the Intercooler.js days. In fact, our legacy customer portal at bomquote.com still runs on Intercooler. I spent the last year building a new version using the "modern" version of that stack: Flask, HTMX, Alpine, and Tailwind.

However, I’ve recently made the difficult decision to rewrite the frontend in React (specifically React/TS, TanStack Query, Orval, and Shadcn). In a perfect world, I'd rewrite the python backend in go, but I have to table that idea for now.

The reason? The "LLM tax." While HTMX is a joy for manual development, my experience the last year is that LLMs struggle with the "glue" required for complex UI items in HTMX/Alpine. Conversely, the training data for React is so massive and the patterns so standardized that the AI productivity gains are impossible to ignore.

Recently, I used Go/React for a microservice that actually has turned into similarly complex scale as the python/htxm app I focused on most of the year, and it was so much more productive than python/htmx. In a month of work I got done what took me about 4-5 months in python/htmx. I assume because the typing with go and also LLM could generate perfectly typed hooks from my OpenAPI spec via Orval and build out Shadcn components without hallucinating.

I still love the HTMX philosophy for its simplicity, but in 2024/2025, I’ve found that I’m more productive choosing the stack that the AI "understands" best. For new projects, Go/React will now my default. If I have to write something myself again (God, I hope not) I may use htmx.