Agentic Coding Tools

Essential

• Formatter: Biome, Ruff.
• Linter: Biome, Ruff.
• Type checker: tsgo, ty.

These run in milliseconds and are a must if you want decent quality code. They are actually a must for humans as well, but it is less obvious.

Good Foundations

• UIKit: primitives built with composition in mind, handcrafted, high quality: shadcn/ui.
• Backend-frontend type safety: Convex is great, it just feels right.

Specific

• TanStack Router, TanStack AI, TanStack Virtual and the rest of the TanStack libraries are usually the best in their domain because of DX. AI likes good DX.
• React Compiler: makes your codebase less memo-shit.
• Knip: for removing unused variables, files, and packages. AI does not like deleting code, it is mostly trained on creating it. This amazing tool, paired with your linter, can limit entropy creation.

Testing

• AI-generated unit tests are mostly useless.
• TDD is goated, hard in practice because you need clear specs.
• AI-generated unit tests are a good way for an AI to test that its implementation works as expected. Keeping the tests is usually not useful, unless they run in negligible time.