Nolan Lawson Benchmark Finds Hono+htmx AI Builds Cost $2.67 a Run
Summary
Nolan Lawson benchmarks 12 JavaScript frameworks by having AI agents build the same PokéAPI app five times each. Hono+htmx costs a median $2.67 per run, while Angular costs $4.97 and takes 17.2 minutes. Next.js ships 142 KiB of JavaScript; Astro ships none.
Key Points
- Lawson uses three Angular iterations for size and performance because two agents fail to build a working app.
- Next.js logs 71 ms of total blocking time against 0 ms for Astro, Hono+htmx, SvelteKit and Vanilla.
- Lawson runs agents on Opus 5.5 at high effort and hides the Lighthouse performance tests from them.