I did.
My startup did.
And now we’re going to rip it all out and move to a React front-end.
HTMX makes response handling much more complex. Every endpoint returns 3–5 different HTML fragments. Frontend and backend must agree on every scenario — success, validation errors, system errors, partial updates, full reloads.
And HTMX is still a fairly obscure library. The documentation and examples are lacking, there isn’t a real set of established best practices at scale, and not for nothing, LLMs aren’t great at it.
React is mature, used at scale, provides separation of concerns, and is great for agentic AI coding. HTMX has its place for simple projects, but for anything non-trivial, it’s a no for me.
My startup did.
And now we’re going to rip it all out and move to a React front-end.
HTMX makes response handling much more complex. Every endpoint returns 3–5 different HTML fragments. Frontend and backend must agree on every scenario — success, validation errors, system errors, partial updates, full reloads.
And HTMX is still a fairly obscure library. The documentation and examples are lacking, there isn’t a real set of established best practices at scale, and not for nothing, LLMs aren’t great at it.
React is mature, used at scale, provides separation of concerns, and is great for agentic AI coding. HTMX has its place for simple projects, but for anything non-trivial, it’s a no for me.