#536 – December 14, 2025
better control over when and how the application overloads the browser’s main thread
Hello! 👋
I can't believe it's almost the end of 2025. This year, I worked on the foundations and the less visible parts of the newsletter. It is back on a homebrewed self-hosted platform with improved deliverability and performance. Emails are more accessible and cleaner. And I'm following almost 1000 different authors and websites every day to find the most interesting articles.
I've put together a short survey so if you'd like to help me make the newsletter better in 2026 please fill it in. It shouldn't take more than 5 minutes. And you can participate in a $30 book voucher draw as a thank you for being an awesome reader. Here's the survey.
React 19.2. further advances INP optimization
5 minutes by Michal Matuška
The release of React 19.2 brought new features that give developers new tools to understand what is happening inside React. It now allows for better control over when and how the application overloads the browser’s main thread. Michal explores two key new features, Activity component and Performance Tracks in Chrome DevTools, in more detail.
Stop Bots and Abuse in Real Time with WorkOS Radar
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Skeletons in my codebase: Tanstack in production
17 minutes by Oscar Gabriel
TanStack Router is powerful but flexible, leaving developers to figure out the best patterns themselves. Oscar learned through trial and error while building Better Chat and shares key insights.
UseEffectEvent in React: Essential Do's and Don'ts
4 minutes by Monica
Monica's guide describes useEffectEvent as an experimental React Hook that lets you read the latest props or state values inside effects without causing those effects to re-run. It creates a stable function that always accesses current values but doesn't trigger effect re-execution when those values change. This solves the common problem of adding dependencies that cause unwanted effect re-runs when you only want to react to specific changes.
TanStack Start: New competitor to Next.js
13 minutes by Ondrej Velisek
Ondrej presents his view of TanStack Start compare to Next.js. He argues that TanStack Start offers better developer experience than Next.js, especially for routing and data fetching. Start provides complete type safety for routes, parameters, and search queries, while Next.js only partially supports this even with its new typedRoutes feature.
React Grab for agents
7 minutes by Aiden Bai, Ben Maclaurin
React Grab now lets you talk directly to coding agents like Claude Code or Cursor from your browser instead of just copying context. You can click any UI element, type what you want changed, and the agent edits your code automatically while you stay in the browser. The tool originally solved the problem of agents guessing which files to edit by providing exact component locations.
AI agents are knocking on the door of your SaaS product. Open it up.
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And the most popular article from the last issue was: