In North America, the US has committed to natural gas turbines and petroleum forever. Not because of any good and evil stooges in politics... but because they have rejected the energy density of nuclear power for whatever reasons decades ago. which was then and now ONLY other comparable energy source on the table.

It will backfire. AI people (like Musk who went big sensibly with natural gas turbines in Memphis)is being targeted and chased because of them. And AI is NOT the (direct, local) job creator it was promised to be.

What it's actually doing is conflating the two. People will react to turbine fumes from AI plants today, to a greater extent than they would even react to a natural gas electric power plant on the same property.

So AI plants will be chased away from cities, relocate near existing power plants, then they will be attacked again by people forcing them to buy 'carbon credits' directly. Most cannot relocate near a nuclear plant because there will be no nuclear growth in the short term and AI lives in the short term.

So AI [plants] will be chased away from people, and then into orbit.

Is everyone okay with that?

I guess my question then is why should someone care about these patterns that are explicitly not what's "important"?

You say things like

"can guide refactoring, onboarding"

and

"For some workflows (e.g. legacy cleanup, team handover, bug tracking), that context can be quite valuable."

But those are vague hand-wavy statements that don't explain themselves. I don't understand why it would be valuable for those tasks, and I could use some explanation of what concrete problem is solved by looking at these details.

I want to make the intent of this blog post extremely clear (which tragically got lost when I got deep into the writing).

I love HTMX, and I've built entire sites around it. But all over the internet, I've seen HTMX praised as this pristine perfect one-stop-solution that makes all problems simple & easy (or at least... easier than any framework could ever do).

This is a sentiment I have not found to be true in my work, and even one where the author of HTMX spoke out against (although I can't find the link :(

It's not a bad solution (it's actually a very good solution), but in real production sites, you will find yourself scratching your head sometimes. For most applications, I believe it will make ALMOST everything simpler (and lighter) than traditional SPA frameworks.

But for some "parts" of it, it is a little tricker, do read "When Should You Use Hypermedia?" [1];

In the next blog post (where we'll be implementing the "REAL" killer features), I hope to demonstrate that "yes, HTMX can do this, but it's not all sunshine & rainbows."

---

On a completely separate note, one may ask, then, "why use HTMX?" Personally, for me, it's not even about the features of HTMX. It's actually all about rendering HTML in the backend with something like Templ [2] (or any type-safe html templating language).

With Templ (or any type-safe templating language), I get to render UI from the server in a type-safe language (Golang) accessing properties that I KNOW exist in my data model. As in, the application literally won't compile & run if I reference a property in the UI that doesn't exist or is of the incorrect type.

You don't get that with a middle-man API communication layer maintained between frontend and backend.

All I need now is reactivity, and htmx was the answer. Hope you understand!

[1] https://htmx.org/essays/when-to-use-hypermedia/#if-your-ui-h...

[2] https://templ.guide/