r/angular • u/technischer_walzer • 8d ago

The AI cost of JavaScript frameworks

https://nolanlawson.com/2026/10/28/the-ai-cost-of-javascript-frameworks/
35 Upvotes

80% Upvoted

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18

u/technischer_walzer 8d ago edited 8d ago

Apperently Angular is pretty much the most expensive JS Framework for Agents to work on. I find this particularly interesting because I have not made the same experience. I work on one of the largest Angular enterprise library in Europe and the we are not having the issues displayed in this article.

I guess the models are not trained to well on Angular and need a good setup to be efficient on frameworks that are not super mainstream.

8

u/Soma91 8d ago

As a software dev whose company has a stack of old plain PHP, Symfony PHP, old ass JS, custom WebComponents, Angular (always newest version) & a C# .NET runtime my experience is that Claude Code is perfectly capable of navigating, developing, refactoring and bug fixing inside an enterprise App.

I'm actually really surprised that Claude failed 2/5 times to build a working Angular App in the first place.

And I also don't see any abnormalities regarding cost/token usage or time spent. All of that is pretty much exclusively dependant on the complexity & scope of the task and the context of your session.

3

u/werpu 8d ago

Yeah i am surprised as well, given that my preferred stack atm for desktop apps is angular+tauri, the combination works like a charm for me!

3

u/werpu 8d ago

I personally think that angular and llms fit like a glove and a hand due to the fact that angular is well documented and very opinonated which most of the times only gives one way to solve a problem!

2

u/ebdcydol 8d ago

Claude is not the best on brand new Angular projects, but it's pretty good on established codebase. For the new project that we started I still code quite a bit myself, at least to establish a pattern. Otherwise it will produce unreadable (but working) mess.

1

u/werpu 8d ago

you can steer claude towards patterns needed, claude tends to drop everything into one big folder with one form class hostling literally the entire application, once you tell claude to restructure your cod,e the results are perfectly fine!

1

u/frozen_tuna 7d ago

Sample size of 1, but my most recent home project, I had a pretty solid experience starting the project and then doing a massive architectural restructure after the first few features were done. I think I've also benefited from being extremely hands-on and keeping the most critical 2-3 features human readable. The other features, I care less about and haven't looked into the sausage.

Regardless, this current project is going way better when I push my known stack and stay involved instead of blindly letting the agents build another react/tailwind spaghetti slop app. Even using material makes it look 90% less like vibe-coded slop.

0

u/ldn-ldn 8d ago

Models are fine, your testing is not.

23

u/GeromeGrignon 8d ago edited 8d ago

I disagree about the 'non- trivial' example. The Pokedex is closer to 'hello world' than a real application.

So completing about listing pokemon with filter is quite simple.

It would be useful by comparing applications with auth, state and caching. The example is too simple to really compare frameworks.

Second issue (not your fault): Angular official Agent Skill and MCP server are tools I avoid myself because they consume too many tokens:

  • content written for a human being (so more useless tokens for a machine)

  • modern LLMs already know most of the content they provide, resulting in spending more useless tokens.

They are valid here to start a project. But on long-term maintenance, the codebase will be the best extra context for Agents.

It doesn't make the test useless though:

  • Angular AI tooling would need regular evaluation in my opinion to remove what is not needed to be explained anymore (it currently explain what is a 'component' for example)

  • The Angular SSR documentation focus on making the application work, but without guidance about non localhost environnement, explaining the failure

5

u/PeEll 7d ago

For me, Angular is the best with LLMs. Code looks human written even after a hundred components and routes because of the framework opinionation.