How good is AI at coding React (really)?

How good is AI at coding React (really)?
21 minutes by Addy Osmani

AI coding benchmarks reveal that models perform well on isolated React tasks like building components, achieving around 40% success. However, performance drops to 25% on complex multi-step work due to state management and design challenges. The key difference between useful AI assistance and messy code lies in context engineering and explicit constraints. Deep React knowledge helps developers guide AI effectively and catch mistakes before they compound.

Bring Order to Frontend Chaos
sponsored by Zencoder

React apps grow fast — and so does the chaos. Zenflow gives frontend teams a spec-driven workflow that keeps UI, state management, and API interactions perfectly aligned. With clear requirements, AI-generated plans, built-in verification, and multi-agent execution with parallel execution, your team ships consistent features without the usual churn. If rework, broken flows, and Slack-thread debugging are slowing you down, Zenflow brings the structure you’ve been missing.

30 years of br tags
about 1 hour by Christoffer Artmann

Web development has gotten incredibly powerful and accessible in 2025. AI tools help developers build things they couldn't before, while mature frameworks and deployment platforms make everything easier and cheaper. Christoffer sshares a retrospective covering 30 years of web development from the static HTML era through today's AI-assisted development. The tools have evolved from basic text editors and FTP uploads to sophisticated frameworks, but the core promise remains the same: the web lets anyone build and share ideas with the world.

Using React transitions for low priority text editor updates
6 minutes by Shane Friedman

Shane improved performance for a client's text editor by using React's Transition APIs. The editor had both a main editor and a preview that shared the same state, causing unnecessary re-renders. By using useDeferredValue for the preview, updates to it became non-blocking and interruptible. This creates a render-aware debounce where the preview only updates when the user pauses typing.

Building type-safe compound components
7 minutes by Dominik Dorfmeister

Compound components work well for flexible layouts with static content, but they're not always the right choice. Dominik suggests that for dynamic content like API-driven select options, using props instead of children reduces boilerplate and provides better type safety. The component factory pattern can make compound components type-safe by creating typed instances through function calls rather than direct imports.

How to write good frontend tests: 37 tips and tricks
34 minutes by HowToTestFrontEnd

This article shares practical tips for writing clear, reliable, and maintainable frontend tests. It focuses on testing user behavior instead of implementation details, avoiding over-mocking and snapshots, handling edge cases, fixing flaky tests, and keeping tests fast and readable. The goal is better developer experience and tests that truly protect your application as it grows.

Tests are dead. Meticulous AI is here.
sponsored by Meticulous

Meticulous automatically creates and maintains an exhaustive e2e UI test suite that covers every corner of your application – with no developer intervention required whatsoever. Dropbox, Lattice, Bilt Rewards and hundreds of organisations rely on Meticulous for their frontend testing. It is built from the Chromium level up with a deterministic scheduling engine – making it the only testing tool that eliminates flakes.

javascript

• A Developer's Guide to Internationalization and Localization
• Fundamentals of Rich Text Editors
• The Concise TypeScript Book

webdev

• !important and CSS Custom Properties
• HTML Input Validation is (maybe) Good
• Fixing the URL params performance penalty
• TTFB doesn't mean what you think it means

And the most popular article from the last issue was:

• The most common React design patterns