TanStack Query

Every data pattern so far has the client asking and the server answering. Real-time inverts that — the server speaks first, and your UI has to be listening. The mistake is treating that live connection as a second, parallel source of truth. Here's how I keep a React app live without ending up with two states that disagree.

TanStack Query is not just a better useEffect. It is the server-state layer of your React app. The hard part is not fetching data — it is designing keys, freshness, invalidation, pagination, and prefetching so the UI stays predictable.