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Comment by JoeyJoJoJr | Hacker News Reader

I’d also add that if you use Typescript with an OpenAPI client generator (https://github.com/ferdikoomen/openapi-typescript-codegen) it can immensely alleviate some of the biggest pain points of seperate backend and front-end. It always used to be a major pain in the ass with the amount of overhead an API change would incur - updating documentation, postman, constant communication between backend and front-end devs, etc. Now I just npm run generate, I see new API changes in my Git client and Typescript errors for code that needs updating.

Also, using a library like Tanstack Query or Rdtk Query can almost completely eliminate manual state management, and kinda makes the whole development experience feel almost like SSR.

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> constant communication between backend and front-end devs

Curious, are you doing anything in your code-generation workflow to solve this specific pain point?

I should have been more specific, the codegen alleviates a large portion of back and forth that would have otherwise been spent asking the backend devs things like “why isn’t this working”, or “what has changed”. There is still a lot of communication involved, but it relates more to the business objectives and less annoying fiddly things. For my current project the backend devs are using a cumbersome enterprise stack - the one saving grace for me being that they have swagger (OpenAPI) docs. As a front-end dev the codegen really helps to shield me from a lot of implementation specific backend stuff, as if the interface changes I am going to be informed about it from the Typescript compiler. Also one really great feature is that specific values for validation, such a min/max character length are also exposed and generated with the codegen so that is also another bunch of variables that I can worry less about when I implement clientside validation.

I’d really recommend taking a look at the tool I linked. I see a bunch of end-to-end Typesafety tools mentioned like GraphQL, Protocol Buffers, etc, but they seem overly prescriptive to me, and most of the time you are gonna be working some basic REST service and an OpenApi/Swagger doc is the best you are going to get from the backend devs.

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