📨 #289: Base UI, shadcn, Vinext, Next.js WS, ChatGPT, Takumi, Shaders | RN cleanup, Navigation, Agents, Sniffler, Metro, Tapflow, ADK, Voltra, WebView, Iso, Audio | TypeScript, ES2026, HTTP QUERY, Node.js

Hi everyone, Seb and Jan here 👋!

Things are relatively calm on the React side this week, but it's still worth highlighting Base UI becoming the default headless lib in shadcn, and Vinext getting close to production-ready.

On the mobile side, React Native 0.87 went full Marie Kondo. We also have a nice preview of React Navigation 8 and the relentless stream of AI tooling updates.

TypeScript 7.0 is out, and it's 10x faster. Ecma has officially approved ES2026, and HTTP is finally getting its long-awaited QUERY method.

Enjoy!

As always, thanks for supporting us on your favorite platform:

• 🦋 Bluesky
• ✖️ X / Twitter
• 👔 LinkedIn
• 👽 Reddit

Don't miss the next email!

One of the few things I regularly read to keep up with the React world.

Theo BrowneFounder of ping.gg - Youtuber

💸 Sponsor

Stop guessing why your Next.js app is slow.

When a Next.js page is slow, the hard part is figuring out which part is responsible: middleware, SSR, an API route, a database query, or an upstream fetch() call. 🔍

Without a trace, you're stuck reproducing locally, adding logs, and guessing. With one, every step shows up as a span in a waterfall, so you see exactly where time went. See how to export those traces with @vercel/otel and decide between OTLP and the Sentry SDK. Learn more ➡️

⚛️ React

• 💸 Formity – Multi-step forms as programmable flows with branching, loops, jumps, and variables.
• 👀 Next.js RFC - First-class WebSocket support in App Router Route Handlers - This proposes a NextResponse.upgrade() to bring WS support in Route Handlers, based on CrossWS. Note that Vercel recently added WebSocket support, and it should also work for self-hosted setups and compatible deployment adapters.
• 📜 Reverse Engineering ChatGPT Web: How OpenAI Built for a Billion Users - An independent analysis of the ChatGPT stack: Tailwind v4, Radix, TanStack Query, and their migration story from Next.js to React Router v7 in Framework Mode. They optimize toward making the chat input interactive as soon as possible.
• 📜 I let React Compiler handle memoization: Here's what actually broke - The Compiler broke the app due to React Hook Form’s watch() method, and Chart.js event handler got stale data. The DevTools Memo ✨ badge can be misleading: it only means the component was processed, and not necessarily perfectly optimized.
• 📜 Hidden Cost of Hydration Mismatches - A single mismatch can push your Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) from green to red, even more if a font loads and resizes text. It’s important to fix those hydration mismatches, but <Suspense> can also limit the damage.
• 📜 Using TanStack Start with Cloudflare Workers - A practical 2-part intro to hosting TanStack Start on Cloudflare Workers, also explaining how to connect efficiently to a DB with Hyperdrive and connection pooling.
• 💸 Product for Engineers - 24 tips for giving S-tier demos
• 📦 Vinext 1.0 Beta - Next.js on Vite - Cloudflare’s fork of Next.js is almost ready for prime time, removing the experimental label. Faster builds, smaller bundles, increased parity with Next.js, and improved cross-platform support. 1.0 announced for later this year, focusing on reliability, security, and complete Next.js compatibility.
• 📦 shadcn 4.13 - Base UI as the Default - After wide community adoption, Base UI is now the default headless lib in the shadcn CLI and documentation. It replaces Radix, which remains supported. Reminder: the same devs who created Radix now work on Base UI.
• 📦 Takumi 2.0 - Renders JSX/HTML to images without a browser, using a single Rust binary - Major release for this lib challenging Satori and next/og on JSX-based social card rendering.
• 📦 Paper Shaders - Zero-dependency canvas shaders for React and vanilla JS - Now free and fully open source.
• 📦 Unlayer Elements - React components for Emails, Web pages, and PDFs - Target 3 platforms from the same component tree.
• 📦 React Hook Form 7.81 - New <FieldArray> component, performance improvements
• 📦 React Google Maps 1.9 - Keyboard events on AdvancedMarker, 3D Map example
• 📦 React Doctor 0.7 - Caching and warm rescan performance improvements
• 🎙️ This Month in React 2026-06 - React Compiler is getting rusty, what does AI mean for engineering culture
• 🎙️ Señors At Scale - URL State at Scale with François Best | nuqs, React, Typescript

Don't miss the next email!

People always ask how I keep up to date, it's This Week In React.

Jack HerringtonPrincipal Engineer - Youtuber

💸 Sponsor

Ship AI generated code safely with Meticulous.

Claude writes your code. Claude reviews your code. Claude fixes the review comments. And somehow, you're the one getting paged at 2am when it breaks in prod.

Fortunately, top AI-driven teams like Dropbox, Notion, LaunchDarkly, and Wiz rely on Meticulous to run 1000s of e2e UI tests autonomously, covering every user flow, edge case, role and permutation. Built by ex-Palantir engineers, Meticulous gives you near-exhaustive coverage in weeks, without any developer effort. 

It works like magic in the background:

• Near-exhaustive coverage on every test run
• No test creation
• No maintenance (seriously)
• Zero flakes (built on a deterministic browser)

Check it out - and see why one engineering leader at Dropbox said that “once we started using Meticulous, we couldn’t imagine working without it.”

📱 React-Native

React Navigation 8.0 - July Progress Report

A new progress report dropped from the React Navigation team. It’s even bigger than the last one shared in March.

Highlights include:

• Suspense-enabled navigation - Navigation state updates are compatible with concurrent rendering, and navigation actions are wrapped in transitions that can wait for pending data loadings or be interrupted.
• Experimental data loaders - This lets you prefetch data before a screen renders, using your favorite data fetching libraries.
• Typed hooks in dynamic navigators
• Simpler types for custom navigators
• Standard Navigation for library authors - A compatibility layer for RN routers to make it possible to create universal custom navigators that work with both React Navigation and the recent Expo Router fork

And more! Check out the full report to learn about all the upcoming features and changes.

The rise of native cloud agentic tooling

Running AI agents on native apps has previously been limited to local devices. Native dependencies, simulator management, and heavy build tools have been a major bottleneck for cloud-based agent infrastructure. That gap is closing fast thanks to simultaneous updates from Callstack and Software Mansion:

• 📜 Closing the Agent Loop: Autonomous React Native Bug Reproduction with Argent
• 🐦 Argent Lens - New design review tool to help you experiment with multiple design variants to get the look you want.
• 📦 Argent 0.14 - Argent Lens, tvOS, Android TV, Vega OS, and make it a big update that unlocks cloud agents and expands support beyond mobile to TV platforms.
• 📦 Agent Device 0.19 - BrowserStack, AWS Device Farm, 6x faster relaunch, derive command, interaction guarantees. The new out-of-viewport coordinate tap warnings will be useful for ensuring consistency in automated QA testing.

• 💸 Maestro MCP - Let your AI agent write, run, and maintain mobile E2E tests
• 👀 React Native 0.87 RC.0 - Big cleanup release - This upcoming release cleans up a lot of things, removing many deprecated APIs such as InteractionManager or <SafeAreaView>, and restricting deep path imports. New deprecations land too, such as <ImageBackground>, to be removed later. See also this umbrella issue: Remove deprecated APIs. All these moves React Native closer to v1 – still “on the horizon” – by reducing its API surface.
• 🗓️ React Native Connection -  🇫🇷 Paris - 24 Sept. Amazing lineup featuring Cédric Van Putten (Expo), Satyajit Sahoo (React Navigation), Jay Meistrich (Legend List), and Filip Kamiński (Argent)! Get a 15% discount with code "TWIR".
• 📜 We Built the Same App in KMP and React Native – Here's What We Found - KMP is faster on Android, slightly similar to React Native iOS.
• 📜 Mobile Module Federation with Re.Pack: When Runtime Delivery Is Worth the Complexity - Module Federation pays off when multiple teams need independent JS release cadences within the same app.
• 📜 How we made Hybrid iOS apps compile 39% faster with React Native Brownfield - Using prebuilt xcframework.
• 💸 Drizz - Tired of rewriting test scripts after every UI change? Describe your test in plain English and let Vision AI handle the rest
• 📦 Sniffler - Run only the E2E tests your changes can affect - New Callstack tool to map your code diff to E2E tests it can affect, so your CI can skip unaffected tests.
• 📦 Tapflow - Self-hosted iOS & Android simulator streaming for the whole team
• 📦 AI ADK - On-device Gemini Nano or cloud Gemini with tool calling and multi-turn sessions
• 📦 Enriched Markdown 0.7 - Switch to RaTeX for faster rendering, improved RTL support, highlight spans, and better accessibility with VoiceOver/TalkBack labels
• 📦 Sentry 8.17 - Experimental Turbo Module performance tracking, Expo Router ErrorBoundary auto-wrap, standalone app start tracing
• 📦 Nitro Fetch 1.5 - Support fetch credentials option
• 📦 Voltra 2.1.0 - Dynamic Widgets with native-side rendering
• 📦 WebView 15.0 - Windows New Architecture support and requirement (breaking change)
• 📦 Metro 0.86.0 - Source maps use 50% less memory and serve 2x faster
• 📦 Iso - Isolated React Native dev environments per project or worktree
• 📦 Bottom Sheet 0.16 - Improved drag behavior
• 📦 RN Audio 0.13 - Stable <Audio/> component, MediaElementAudioSourceNode for custom effects, filters, and signal processing
• 📦 Rock 0.14 - Add support for generating XCFramework from static library
• 📦 Nitro Vision Kit - On-Device background removal & image classification
• 🎥 Where Reanimated Goes Next | Interview With Bartłomiej Błoniarz
• 🎥 Why Nitro Is More Than a Faster Bridge | Interview With Marc Rousavy
• 🎙️ React Universe On Air - React Native Ease: Faster Native Animations with Janic Duplessis

🔀 Other

• 📣 Ecma International approved ES2026 - Now that it’s officially approved, let’s remind you what's new in ECMAScript 2026, including Array.fromAsync(), Error.isError(), and Map.getOrInsert().
• 📣 The HTTP QUERY Method is now an IETF Proposed Standard - HTTP now officially has a QUERY method. It’s similar to GET (safe, idempotent, cacheable) but allows a body/payload. Don’t be fooled by RFC / Proposed Standard: many things you use are at this stage, including HTTP 2.
• 📜 Staged publishing for supply-chain security - After the TanStack compromise, nuqs hardened its release pipeline, adopting the new npm staged publishing feature with a draft->validate->finalize flow and the ability to check tarball integrity locally, sharing many other security tips along the way.
• 📜 Getting Started with CSS Anchor Positioning - This lets you position a floating element (tooltip, dropdown) near another element in pure CSS, with overflow flipping behavior. This interactive blog post focuses on the critical parts of this large API. With 81% browser support, it’s a good time to learn it!
• 📦 TypeScript 7.0 - 10x faster native port of TypeScript - Here it is! The battle-tested, production-ready, much faster TypeScript port in Go is officially live. Up to 16x type-checking speed with parallelization. It also moves to strict: true by default, removes deprecations, and improves watch mode.
• 📦 Node 26.5 - Support for Import Text (experimental), blob.textStream, ReadableStreamTee - Import Text is quite exciting for docs sites looking to document code snippets. Unfortunately, behind a flag for now.
• 📦 Vite+ Beta - Unifies the runtime, package manager, and frontend tools - Stable, but not yet feature-complete.
• 📦 ESLint Plugin TailwindCSS 4.0 - Support for Tailwind v4
• 📦 Webpack Dev Server 6.0 - Express v5, Node.js 22.15+, ESM-only
• 📦 pnpm 11.10 - _auth setting for CI, pnpm self-update can update to v12 (the Rust port)

🤭 Fun

See ya! 👋