The fate of React

Today’s issue: Taming a million lines of TypeScript, cooking with agents, and collecting insider trading secrets for Polymarket from your friends who work at Google.

Welcome to #452.

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The fate™️ of React

All the Gen Z kids on TikTok are talking about how they want to go back to 2016 again, but there’s only one man I know who’s actually putting in the work to get us there: Christoph Nakazawa.

He just released the initial alpha of fate, a modern data client for React and tRPC that tries to give you all the data layer goodness that Relay and GraphQL promised us in the mid-2010s – without forcing you to adopt an entirely new query language and backend worldview.

How we got here: Christoph was on the original Relay and React teams at Facebook back in 2013 and later created and led projects like Jest, Metro, and Yarn. He’s long been a Relay/GraphQL advocate, but eventually ran into the hard reality that if you were already using tRPC (or something similar), adopting GraphQL on the backend was a huge investment with mixed returns.

That friction is at least part of why GraphQL became so divisive, and why Relay never really took off. Christoph created fate to provide the best of both worlds – tRPC’s end-to-end type safety, plus GraphQL-style ergonomics for data fetching.

Here’s what that looks like:

• View composition – Co-located data requirements that compose into one batched request per screen, eliminating waterfalls

• Strict selection + data masking – Prevents accidental coupling and overfetching by enforcing strict data selection for each view, and hiding data that components didn’t request

• Async React – Built around modern React primitives like Suspense, use, and Actions, along with optimistic updates and automatic rollbacks baked in

Bottom Line: Unlike the Duffer Brothers, Christoph isn’t just trying to milk one of his earlier inventions for money and nostalgia bait a decade later. fate is a serious attempt to finally deliver on Relay’s initial promise by removing one of the biggest barriers that stopped it from catching on in the first place.

It’s still early days for the project, but it definitely looks promising.

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Augment Code is the AI agent built for professional developers

Every coding agent uses the same models – but Augment’s Context Engine makes it “orders of magnitude better” for large, professional codebases.

This allows it to finish complex tasks, instead of just suggesting lines of code. Here’s how:

• Real-time knowledge graph that indexes all of your repos, services, and history, so it knows how everything connects

• Architectural awareness of your team’s commit history, codebase patterns, docs, and tickets, so it can write production-ready code

• Intelligent context curation that retrieves only what matters for your request and respects access permissions.

Try it out for free on your monorepo or multi-repos – and see why it’s used heavily by teams at Vercel, Uber, Stripe, and more.

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Did you know that Chrome DevTools has some magical shortcuts powered by the $? Here are some of the most useful ones:

$() - is an alias for document.querySelector(). It allows you to select the first element that matches a given CSS selector. For example, $('div') would return the first div element on the page.

$$() - is an alias for document.querySelectorAll(). It returns an array of all elements that match a given CSS selector. For example, $$('div') would return all div elements on the page.

$0, $1, $2, ... $n - are references to the elements you have recently selected in the Elements panel. $0 represents the most recently selected element, $1 represents the second most recent, and so on.

$_ - represents the value of the most recently evaluated expression in the console.

$x() - allows you to query the DOM using XPath expressions. For example, $x("//div") would return all div elements on the page.

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1. Sunil Pai wrote about why some developers cook with coding agents and others don’t. Surprisingly, it’s not entirely dependent on having a Zyn addiction.

2. Addy Osmani shared 21 lessons learned from 14 years at Google, but unfortunately he didn’t include any insider info that would help me make millions on Polymarket. Next time.

3. Kadi Kraman wrote a great guide on the Expo blog about everything React developers need to know before building their first React Native app – including which of your web instincts will work and which ones will betray you immediately. [sponsored]

4. Do macOS Tahoe’s icons betray Apple’s own interface guidelines? Nikita Prokopov believes so. The last time Apple betrayed me was when they discontinued the iPhone 5c before I could buy the lime green one.

5. Mattias Geniar explained why web development is fun again.

6. Aiden Bai created Repogrep, an AI agent that can search across any public GitHub repo.

7. CodeRabbit’s OSS Program gives open-source projects free access to all their Pro-tier code review features. Used by projects like Bun, Vue, Nix, and 100k+ others to ship better code. [sponsored]

8. Josh Ribakoff explained how Twitch tamed a million lines of TypeScript.

9. Chris Loy wrote an essay on the “industrial revolution” currently happening to software development. I’m just hoping I end up better off than our boy Oliver Twist.

10. CarbonQA provides high-quality QA services for dev teams, so you’ll never have to waste time testing your own app again. Their US-based *human* testers work in your tools, talk with your team on Slack, and let your devs spend their time building real features. [sponsored]

11. Nikola Balic created a curated catalog of agentic AI patterns that help you utilize coding agents in production.

12. 2025 was a big year for databases, as chronicled by Andy Pavlo. It was also a big year for economists saying stuff like, “it’s the first time we’ve seen this happen in the US economy since 2008.” But I’m sure everything’s fine.