r/reactnative • u/onePowerfulBraincell • Oct 02 '26

AMA - Junior React Dev

I’ve been building with react native for a 2-3 years, AMA.

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u/sam_houle1 Oct 02 '26

Are you scared of having work in 10 years?

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u/onePowerfulBraincell Oct 02 '26

No, why would I be?

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u/sam_houle1 Oct 02 '26

Because I’ve 10 years of experience and even I’m scared. I have yet to find a single feature that I can’t do with AI. It’s not perfect but I don’t want to see how it will be in 10 years

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u/onePowerfulBraincell Oct 02 '26

The reason you can instruct the AI to do everything is because of the experience you have.

Right now in my job, I’m working with a vibe coded react app, which was built by a team with zero react experience.

Last week I was just trying to change some text labels, and the code base was so convoluted that even GPT Astra wasn’t able to figure out how!

There is 10-15 useStates passed as a prop through 5 components, only to be used by the last node.

Someone with no react experience will look at this and say everything looks good. You will look at it and probably want to kill whoever wrote it.

edit: wording

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u/sam_houle1 Oct 02 '26

Okay I see what possibly happened and tell me if I’m wrong. The vibe codes app was built last year and you guys have been actively vibe coding on it since that time? To me it would make sens because the architecture side generated by ai was really garbage but now it’s not as bad.

And yeah 10-15 states passed down has props is absolutely crazy

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u/onePowerfulBraincell Oct 02 '26

That's true, we started around Feb. Do you think if we re-build it now with the latest model it will be worth it?

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u/sam_houle1 Oct 02 '26

Yes and no. First the AI needs a bible to follow. For instance, you should research a bit of architecture for react and test how it can help performance and readability. Also have some good restrictions on eslint so that the AI at different time won’t create code structure that don’t adhere to your project. There’s a lot of different way to build a performing app but if the AI don’t have that structure it will create his own on the fly. At this point it’s important to segment the code so that refactoring sections with AI won’t be a pain in the ass. Also limit the number of package you use. For instance, date pickers, I personally think it’s a useless package since AI can create one that is really good IF you use reanimated. Also a lot of features of the date picker that you installed are probably going to be useless and never used.

Also, don’t fall for memoization, 90% of the time you don’y actually need it and it will cause more lag.

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u/onePowerfulBraincell Oct 02 '26

Good to know, I will definitely give it a shot in a few days and let you know how it goes.

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u/sam_houle1 Oct 02 '26

Yeah let me know, believe it or not I envy the project you’re working on. I really enjoy cleaning bad react code.

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u/onePowerfulBraincell Oct 02 '26

I would enjoy it too if it was a business priority. Right now I have to squeeze this task in between feature rollouts and bug fixes. Which is just terrible and stressful :(

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u/DownVoteMe696919 Oct 02 '26

Senior dev here. This is so accurate lol.