The AI cost of JavaScript frameworks
Comments
Ranked by a public rubric, not by votes: what a comment adds counts, not who wrote it. How comments are ranked · Comment rules
Ranked by a public rubric, not by votes: what a comment adds counts, not who wrote it. How comments are ranked · Comment rules
Summary
Nolan Lawson benchmarked 12 JavaScript frameworks by having Claude Code (Opus 5.5) build the same Pokémon app 3–5 times each. Median cost ran from $2.67 for Hono+htmx to $4.97 for Angular, which also wrote the most code (about 2,000 lines versus 1,370). Lighthouse performance and accessibility scores were near ceiling everywhere; JavaScript shipped ranged from 0 KiB (Astro) to 142 KiB (Next.js). Caveats: one content-heavy app, high run-to-run variance, and Lighthouse favors multi-page sites.