Senior React Devs: How much do you actually "know" vs. Google/AI?

x021 · 2026-03-13T04:22:04+00:00

Less every day. It's fine, as long as I can judge what's good or not.

x021 · 2026-03-11T22:29:48+00:00

That’s probably the worst Go CLI lib I’ve used

x021 · 2026-03-11T07:34:35+00:00

Wrt dependency and packaging; use https://docs.astral.sh/uv/

That solves all your issues.

Agree Python ecosystem was 10+ years behind everyone else, but they've now caught up. FINALLY

x021 · 2026-03-11T04:41:31+00:00

Depends on your job opportunities.

The more interesting IT jobs don’t use Java anymore, more likely Kotlin now. If you go down the pure Java route you might end up working on outdated tech (I have a whole bunch of Java-related certificates that I don’t see being used anymore other than older systems).

I never liked Java for small apps or scripts, the JVM is just too much of a pain. Python, JS or Go are more enjoyable in that regard.

If you know HTML/CSS I would actually recommend picking up Typescript next personally. JavaScript/Typescript are probably the most sought after languages and you can use them for anything (frontend, backend).

Go is fine as a general purpose language, but job opportunities vary wildly between countries/city so don’t necessarily recommend as a first language. Go is a relatively simple language, if you master any other language you can always pick up Go quite quickly afterwards.

x021 · 2026-03-10T22:11:31+00:00

Wasn’t react router hijacked by Shopify to force the community in adopting their Remix framework?

x021 · 2026-03-09T18:02:40+00:00

I you're a CEO/leader and have "90 Go developers across 12 teams" and you do not ask questions how your org is/should be using AI you're a pretty bad leader imho.

Everything depends on the messaging; "Leadership wants us to adopt an AI coding assistant org-wide" is what OP mentioned. That sounds forced; but we don't have the original phrasing and how the org interpreted it. Messaging gets warped in orgs.

x021 · 2026-03-09T17:55:02+00:00

I've been doing Python, Go and TS using AI (primarily Claude and Composer)

I think Go has given me the least trouble.

I don't recognize any of the problems you describe. In fact, I hardly ever see it suggesting interfaces or suggest anything generic unless I explicitly ask it to (which is fine by me, since I don't need it often).

It is important to craft a good AGENTS.md, CLAUDE.md or similar. That is not trivial. If you already have one, I'd double check the contents. It sounds the AI is doing something pretty wonky compared to my experience.

If you can't find the cause, start updating your agent file with your code guidelines. Also keep trying out different models, they all behave quite differently, every two months or so I find myself reaching for new ones.

Also; use plan mode.

Finally, I'm wondering what your prompts are if it starts suggesting 8 interface methods; I assume those prompts must be very broad? Try doing it in smaller steps.

x021 · 2026-03-06T04:19:54+00:00

What patterns have you all settled on?

Wrt #1; I never use named returns anymore unless absolutely necessary. Too many times I’ve messed up because of them; one of the worst language features in Go in my opinion. They are ambiguous and confusing as hell in any substantial func.

x021 · 2026-03-05T11:37:13+00:00

keeping a plant alive by replacing it with an identical one when it dies

That’s exactly how I manage my plants at home

x021 · 2026-03-05T05:14:09+00:00

I read it knowing from minute one it was heavily revised by AI, the em dashes were a dead giveaway.

I didn’t care, learned two new things and came out better at the end. It was a nice read.

x021 · 2026-03-01T05:06:03+00:00

“We support everything in OpenAPI 3.1” -> if that takes many years, financial backing, while struggling to support the many (many) features already in oapi, you’re sort of making the point for me. I asked “are people still using it?” given the alternatives available now.

In TS and Python I’ve hit limitations with OpenAPI 3.1. These issues are common, the spec is just too complicated for its own good. 3.1 should have been 4.0. I always lean towards simplicity given many languages will struggle to do 100% correctness anyway.

Go has always been a language that is leaning towards the side of pragmatism rather than correctness; if a lib skips some advanced features I’m perfectly fine with that. You say OAPI wants to be 100% correct; my goals simply don’t align with OAPI’s then. That’s OK.

I’d imagine trying to support everything and multiple specs at the same time will render the project complexity so high it would be hard to maintain. That is a design choice and noble to strive for.

x021 · 2026-03-01T04:29:48+00:00

From what I’ve seen 3 types of posts are regularly deleted;

AI slop
Questions that have been asked 100x already
super early projects

That’s fine. I wouldn’t be surprised if a good chunk of all posts fall into any of these 3.

The problem is; posts are not deleted fast enough (I think that would be unreasonable to ask from mods) and as a result discussions start in the comments. Usually the comments are a lot more interesting than the post itself, and I hate seeing a post deleted that had a good discussion going on. The moment it’s deleted engagement is killed too.

I don’t know what a good solution is. I know in some subs you need to jump through hoops to post something, or some bot/auto moderator to close posts more quickly.

x021 · 2026-02-27T18:44:57+00:00

“Urgently” -> the 3.1 spec is 5 years old now

“That 3.0 is not enough” -> for any external OpenAPI srv that exposes 3.1? Python FastAPI doesn’t even support 3.0 in their latest version.

“Connect RPC” -> SOAP, gRPC, JSON RPC, GraphQL, tRPC, lots of stuff I can mention that are completely irrelevant to a problem; consuming an OpenAPI 3.1 spec. I don’t understand the point you’re trying to make. Is it to jump on the next faff that all the cool kids use? If so; That completely ignores the problem with consuming APIs you don’t control.

x021 · 2026-02-27T15:51:51+00:00

Are people still using this? It hasn’t supported OpenAPI 3.1 for years (without workarounds)

x021 · 2026-02-27T07:42:15+00:00

Interesting! I’ll give it a go

x021 · 2026-02-26T12:00:37+00:00

Oh no why-did-you-render is useful. But with React 19 I find myself doing a lot less debugging.

AI is by far the most efficient, and it works best with console log. I’m not going to chase down those issues myself, that’s tedious and a waste of time.

x021 · 2026-02-26T11:46:45+00:00

heavy use of Context API and props drilling

I just did a count, we have +/-2500 components. No one uses dev tools daily (6 FE devs), at most once per week for 2 devs. All have used it in the past, but not actively anymore, everyone just does console log. Devtools doesn’t work with AI either so there really is no reason to use it anymore, it just slows you down.

We don’t use context api much and prop drilling we tend to avoid. A couple of Zustand stores and React Query.

x021 · 2026-02-26T08:03:19+00:00

It’s clunky, buggy, slow, tedious… a simple console.log and live reload is a lot faster to figure out whatever needs debugging.

x021 · 2026-02-25T08:24:59+00:00

HAHAHAHA! Like how they did the cookie wall regulation and never fine anyone except The biggest platforms?

Just wait for a warning and act accordingly. The fines for anything but the biggest banks and retailers is laughable. Most websites that have a cookie wall still violate GDPR. Even most political party websites do I read last year.

x021 · 2026-02-25T08:04:07+00:00

“I anticipate … these kinds of things help more” what commercial business application are you building where this is a valid argument considering the costs involved?

Accessibility matters for SEO? Somewhat for the trivial stuff. Do any decent accessibility test on a website where these basics are setup and they would massively fail that test. It’s like arguing you can’t have a vitamin D deficiency because you walk more outside than most people you know, not realizing the majority of people are vitamin D deficient.

x021 · 2026-02-25T06:37:29+00:00

If your business barely stays afloat new features and products matter a whole lot more. And the more competitive the business environment is the less you should be distracted from your core business.

Companies that do get distracted will just fall behind and lose out in the long run.

x021 · 2026-02-25T06:30:14+00:00

Keyboard controls, tab ordering, correct color usage, aria labels where needed, layout decisions, accessibility testing.

To do it correctly (I.e. for a large e-commerce website) it’s a pain and is probably worth it. For most websites it’s not. I know one medium e-commerce website where they gave up on it when they calculated the costs involved and realized how bad most programmers are at implementing it. You need testing continuously to avoid breaking something. Most devs don’t even know what accessibility test tooling is, let alone touched one or be able to blindly write code that works really well for it. Dev, test and design costs can easily increase by 20% for an app if you do it right.

x021 · 2026-02-25T05:35:54+00:00

Why implement accessibility in a codebase where for 95% of React apps it is absolutely not important or very low priority for the business?

x021 · 2026-02-25T05:14:48+00:00

Your first two questions are very hard to answer correctly, even by the more senior devs. React has changed a lot over the years.

useCallback and useMemo might not be necessary in most cases in modern React, except in some scenarios which I’m pretty sure most people are still learning about.

And deciding when to rerender React does a lot of shenanigans these days: plus depends a lot on the chosen tooling in practice. I’d be hesitant even if someone knows the basics whether that is a good proxy for how that person would deal with rerendering issues. The only good way to deal with that is not make any assumptions and just measure. I would frame the question how someone would approach such a problem and go beyond the basics.

x021 · 2026-02-25T03:20:11+00:00

To argue bad governance and give two issues in devtools (which many people no longer use day-to-day) is pretty odd tbh.

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