Hey guys,
Welcome to another edition of Import React by Cosden Solutions!
The whole internet decided to gang up on React this week, and honestly some of the arguments land. Meanwhile a React Native–only AI model just showed up, and one team rewrote their app to be twice as fast and published the entire stack.
Let's get into it.
⚡️ The Latest In React
🤖 Code Review for React Teams Shipping AI-Written Diffs
Your AI assistant writes most of the UI now; your PR reviewer was built when a human wrote every line, different bug shapes, different review jobs. Agentfield just open-sourced pr-af, a multi-agent code reviewer that runs on open or closed models (Kimi, DeepSeek, Claude) for cents per PR, drops into GitHub Actions in minutes, and designs a review lens per PR rather than running a fixed checklist — you set what blocks and what ships. Apache 2.0. [ad]
🔥 Does Anybody Actually Like React?
Someone built an entire site that does nothing but collect every "you should stop using React" take from the last few years, and it hit the Hacker News front page with 130+ comments in a few hours. The criticisms range from "the DX complaints miss the real problem" to teams quietly rewriting in Svelte, Solid, and LiveView. The most-upvoted comment isn't a takedown though, it's a defense so backhanded it might be worse than the criticism.
📱 Callstack Built an AI Model That Only Knows React Native
While everyone chases bigger general models, the React Native core-contributor team at Callstack went the other way and trained a small one that does nothing but mobile React Native work, native modules, platform constraints, the whole mess. Their claim is the spicy part, frontier-level results on RN tasks at a fraction of the cost of the big models. It's already running on their own engineers and just opened a private beta.
⚡️ They Rewrote Their App to Be Twice as Fast — Here's Exactly How
The dev behind the viral "why is Linear so fast" breakdown sat down with one of Conductor's founders to reverse-engineer their rewrite. The full stack is in the post (and it's a fascinating set of choices — one swap in particular is going to start arguments). The kicker buried in the interview, the founders barely knew React when they started the company.
🤔 Is shadcn/ui Actually Worth Learning in 2026?
A simple question on r/reactjs turned into the realest thread about component libraries in a while, copy-paste vs. dependency, what happens when you've got 40 components you now own, and whether the whole approach ages well.
🔐 A Proper Guide to TanStack Start Authentication
TanStack Start keeps eating mindshare, but auth is where everyone gets stuck. This is the clearest end-to-end walkthrough I’ve seen, the kind of thing to bookmark now and thank yourself for later.
Quick Links
100+ open-source agent recipes from the same Agentfield team - harnesses, tool use, retries, evals. Apache 2.0. *
The Best Loading States Are No Loading States — A genuinely contrarian take on spinners and skeletons. You'll either nod along or want to argue.
skelter — And right on cue: a tool that auto-generates skeleton loaders from your component layout so you stop hand-building them. Read the article above, then decide if you still need this.
Deprecating a React Component the Right Way — A clever use of TypeScript overloads to warn consumers without breaking them. Tiny trick, surprisingly satisfying.
How to Evaluate an npm Package (2026 Edition) — After the year npm has had, the checklist for "should I actually install this" has changed. This is the updated version.
TypeScript Tips Everyone Should Know — A growing list of TS patterns. Bet you don't already know all of them.
App.js Conf — The big React Native conference lineup is up. Worth a look if a summer trip to Kraków is on the table.
🧠 AI & General Programming
🌧️ The Eternal Sloptember
George Hotz on what happens to software when AI-generated "slop" becomes the default. It's pointed, and a little doom-y.
🐢 Using AI to Write Better Code More Slowly
The title sounds backwards on purpose. Nolan Lawson makes the case that the fast path with AI is quietly the expensive one, and that deliberately slowing down is how you actually come out ahead. The reasoning is better than the summary.
🧠 Simon Willison on Claude Opus 4.8
The most reliably level-headed AI writer breaks down what's actually new in the latest Opus, and where the gap between demo and daily driver still is.
🧪 With Claude: Less Coding, More Testing
A veteran dev describes how agentic coding flipped his day, less time typing implementation, far more time designing tests and reviewing. A good companion read to the Nolan piece above.
🗜️ headroom
A local tool that compresses everything your AI agent reads, tool outputs, logs, RAG chunks, before it hits the model. The claimed savings (and the leaderboard number it's racked up) are the reason it's at 4.8k stars.
📘 AI Engineering for Developers
A practical primer for devs who keep hearing "AI engineering" and want the actual map, not the hype.
🙋 How Do You Actually Start Contributing to Open Source?
A question everyone's had and few admit, and the r/reactjs answers are unusually generous. If "contribute to OSS" has been on your list for two years, start here.
See you next week,
Darius