htmx

Server-rendered pages with islands of interactivity, using htmx to swap fragments instead of shipping a client-side router. It’s less JavaScript than I expected to need for what turned out to be a mostly-CRUD admin panel.

The mental model is smaller than a SPA’s: a request comes in, the server decides what HTML to send back, and the browser swaps it in. No client-side state to keep in sync with the server, because there mostly isn’t client-side state.

The trade-off is real for anything genuinely interactive — a drag-and-drop board, live collaborative editing — where htmx starts fighting the problem instead of solving it. For the 80% of internal tools that are forms and tables, it’s been a relief.