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)

> ... 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.

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.

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