TanStack nourishes its children

Issue #378.March 25, 2025.2 Minute read.
Bytes

Today’s issue: Reading the Windows blog (by choice), the bitterest lesson about LLMs, and the React tool that finally helped me understand my French prison name.

Welcome to #378.

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The Main Thing

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Tanner blessing us with another TanStack library

TanStack nourishes its children

When’s the last time you dropped everything you were doing to learn about a hot new form library?

Well, get ready to clear your calendar and quiet quit even harder, because TanStack Form v1 is here to party.

Like the other projects in the TSCU, TanStack Form aims to provide an all-in-one solution that emphasizes type-safety – but do we really *need* another form library?

The short answer is yes.

The long answer is yes because existing form libraries haven’t kept up with the pace of innovation in the rest of JS ecosystem, so modern form handling in JavaScript usually requires a using outdated libraries and/or building your own custom implementation from scratch and also most JS frameworks don’t have their own built-in solution for form handling which is kind of weird but I don’t have enough space in this run-on sentence to get into that right now.

TanStack Form looks to provide all the features you need for handling all of your modern, form-related needs – including reactive data binding and state management, complex validation, accessibility, cross-platform compatibility, and more.

Let’s take a closer look at what it gets you:

  • First-class TypeScript support – including excellent autocompletion, generic throughput, inferred types, and schema validation.

  • Granularly reactive APIs – only relevant components get updated when the form state changes, so you get a faster UI with zero worries about performance (it has zero deps 🙏).

  • Headless and framework agnostic – Its headless approach allows you to build custom, reusable form components for your application with very little abstraction. And the library itself works seamlessly across multiple front-end frameworks.

Bottom Line: Building forms isn’t the sexiest thing in the world, so most of us have become blind to how less-than-ideal the process has become.

But if there’s one thing I’ve learned from watching hours of mukbang videos, it’s that taking a long, hard look at unattractive problems can lead to surprisingly satisfying results.

        
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Cool Bits

  1. tRPC v11 comes with a new TanStack React Query integration, FormData support, and improved support for React Server Components.

  2. Frimousse is a lightweight, unstyled emoji picker for React that means “sweet little face” in French. So that’s what those French dudes were calling me when I was forced to spend the night in a Paris jail back in 2007.

  3. story.to.design is a Figma plugin that lets you automatically turn your Storybook components into Figma components. [sponsored]

  4. The Cloudflare team wrote about How to build and deploy remote MCP servers to Cloudflare. MCP servers are a Minecraft thing, right?

  5. Gemini 2.5 just came out and claims to be Google’s “most intelligent AI model,” because that’s usually how new releases work.

  6. Next.js got hit by a critical 9.1 level security exploit to its middleware. Apparently that scale only goes up to 10 (I checked), which should give them a solid A-. Congrats everybody.

  7. Figma to Bolt lets you go from Figma to a pixel-perfect full-stack app – just put bolt.new in front of the URL and start prompting away. [sponsored]

  8. Ankit Maloo wrote an article called The Bitter Lesson: rethinking how we build AI systems. The bitterest lesson of all is realizing that none of us will be spared from the singularity, no matter how many times we tell Claude “thank you.”

  9. TkDodo gave a conference talk on lessons he’s learned from React Query’s API design while maintaining the library for the past few years.

  10. Kevin Babbitt and Patrick Brosset wrote on the Microsoft Windows blog about a new way to draw separators in CSS. The only other time I’ve ever willingly read something on the Windows blog was when I finally got serious about playing Spider Solitaire at my old job.