[whatarethembits]

As someone who’s done this for a small project recently; it’s not comparable. The mental overhead and application complexity is significantly lower with htmx. Yes I’d get a better ecosystem and more features with a front end, but do I really need it? Turns out the answer is no, at least for me. In short, with htmx and alpine, the ceiling of what I can achieve is much higher than before. In fact it meets almost 100% of requirements on projects that I’ve worked on in the last 5 years. The few cases where I’d need to opt for something bigger, usually a component or two on particular pages, I’d imagine I could reach for something like Svelte for those components alone.

I find that I’m able to move dramatically faster with this paradigm and able to maintain old codebases as a solo dev with minimal mental overhead. If I’m to give that up, there better be a really good reason. I haven’t come across that situation yet.