⚡Hono Plus htmx Wins Agentic JavaScript Framework Benchmark at $2.67 Per App

Your AI coding agent might prefer server-rendered frameworks

Hono paired with htmx built the cheapest app in a new agentic benchmark, at a median of $2.67 per app. Astro came in close behind at $2.76, and Nuxt was the cheapest SPA-style option at $2.82. The gap at the top is small enough that the top three are within margin of error, so you can pick any of them and be fine. If you're using Claude Code, Cursor, or any agent to scaffold frontends, this is the signal you needed. The winners favor convention, stable APIs, and concise code, which is exactly what an agent can hold in context. Server-centric frameworks beat client-heavy SPA setups on efficiency. The human side matters too: the benchmark explicitly says to weigh maintenance, not just agent cost. The testing was rigorous. Each framework ran across five independent sandbox runs with repeated iterations, and a custom test suite checked that each app met spec. Google Lighthouse measured transfer size and runtime, and every resulting app passed accessibility and performance checks. Nuxt used the fewest tokens at 3.85 million. Angular was the priciest, and Next.js and TanStack Start took more than twice as long as the leaders.