AI agent built one app on 11 JS frameworks: price spread nearly doubled

Nolan Lawson published a benchmark where the AI agent Claude Opus 5.5 built the same Pokémon catalog on 11 JavaScript frameworks: the cheapest were Hono+htmx ($2.67) and Astro ($2.76), while the most expensive was Angular ($4.97, 9.76M tokens, 2 out of 5 runs failed the specification).

Compiled by Sergey KostenchukPublished 2026-11-01Updated 2026-11-01

2026-11-01 Coding Anthropic

💻 AI agent built one app on 11 JS frameworks: price spread nearly doubled

Nolan Lawson (author of PouchDB) ran a benchmark: Claude Opus 5.5 in a sandbox built a Pokémon catalog on 11 JS frameworks. The cheapest were Hono+htmx ($2.67) and Astro ($2.76), while the most expensive was Angular ($4.97, 9.76M tokens, 2 out of 5 runs failed the specification).

🌍 The size of generated code becomes a direct economic factor: it determines token costs for building and maintenance. Angular uses 2.3 times more tokens than Hono+htmx, and the price is 1.9 times higher. For content sites, the MPA approach outperforms SPA.

👤 When choosing a stack for a content site, look not at Lighthouse (Performance 97–100), but at JS weight and Total Blocking Time: Astro — 0 KiB and 0 ms, Angular — 103 ms. The conclusion is not universal for interactive SPAs.

Source 1: https://nolanlawson.com/2026/10/28/the-ai-cost-of-javascript-frameworks/ Source 2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50323088

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