The demos are intoxicating — a chat box, a streaming response, thirty lines of code and it feels like magic. Then you try to ship it and the hard parts show up all at once: streaming UI, structured output you can trust, state that doesn't fight you. Here's what building AI into a real React app actually takes.
Error handling is not a catch block sprinkled at the end. In a React + TanStack app, it is a product decision: what fails locally, what fails at the route level, what can retry, and what the user needs to do next.
Flat folders are fine until every feature starts touching routes, queries, forms, permissions, and UI state. Here's the React structure I use when a TanStack app grows past the simple stage without turning FSD into folder theater.
Not a TypeScript tutorial. A focused look at the patterns that eliminate real production bugs in React + TanStack apps — typed API layers, discriminated unions for async state, route param inference, and generic components done right.
Every new React project starts with the same question: which tools? After years of watching teams assemble mismatched libraries that fight each other, I stopped choosing independently. This is the coherent stack I now use by default — and why.