TanStack Router gave us a useful precedent around the same time because it had its own state graph, its own adapters, and the same need to run well across React, Solid, and Vue. Its work on a store factory and native Solid primitives showed that the core could depend on a small shared shape while each adapter supplied the implementation that made sense for its framework.

Thank you for the additional clarification and for the considerable expenditure of explanatory effort represented by the preceding response. Before proceeding further with the underlying technical question, it may be useful to establish a more explicit shared understanding concerning the relationship between the quantity of information supplied, the extent to which that information is necessary for the immediate decision being made, and the finite amount of maintainer attention available for converting the supplied information into an actionable conclusion. For the avoidance of doubt, the concern being raised here is not that factual accuracy, reproducibility, technical precision, correction of earlier assertions, or sufficient evidentiary support are undesirable. Each of those properties is useful and may, under the appropriate circumstances, be necessary. 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but we believe in opening source what we actually rely on. In fact, we are moving all development to GitHub, making it open and transparent to the community.

vs Svelte ​TypeScript-first approachJSX-like syntax instead of HTML templatesMultiple components per fileSimilar reactivity concepts but different syntax

In Solid, the component body is setup code. It runs a single time.

So that alone is something that makes Solid's approach standout.

Yeah Svelte uses its compiler. They have a syntax which makes components easily identifiable vs just other functions so they can localize their transform. I think it sets the wrong precedence. It basically lies about the capabilities of the system. If that is the biggest sticking point people are valuing the wrong things. I can't stop them from doing so, but I'm ok with them learning for themselves the hard way. At certain point denying the truth is just building a house of cards. Look at the whole class handling in Svelte 5. It might be ergonomic but it is representative of the slippery slope I'm talking about. Once you start lying you have to maintain that lie.

A memo is a read-only derived value.

Preact Signals provide a minimal signal implementation that works with Preact or React:

const count = signal(0); const doubled = computed(() => count.value * 2);

Signals break component boundaries. A signal defined in one component can be read by any other component that imports it. This enables powerful patterns but violates React's principle that data flows down through props and up through callbacks.

The convergence on signals across frameworks proves the pattern's universality. Each framework adapted signals to its existing architecture while preserving the core mental model.

Signals libraries for React: @preact/signals-react and jotai provide signal-like primitives that work within React's model. These are viable for performance-critical components.

The convergence of major frameworks on signals-based reactivity is not fashion—it is a recognition that the virtual DOM model, while powerful, has a fundamental inefficiency: it describes what to render rather than what changed. Signals describe exactly what changed and update exactly what depends on it.

Signals invert this. Instead of "re-run everything and figure out what changed," signals say "run only what is directly subscribed to the specific value that changed." The computational difference is significant in applications with large component trees and frequent state updates.

Server routes are meant for HTTP endpoints that need to be called from outside your TanStack Start application. If you only need to call server-side logic from within your Start app and want Start to handle serialization for you, use server functions instead.

To quickly visualize this handshake, here is a diagram:

adopting Start means joining an ecosystem of modular, composable tools rather than committing to a monolithic framework. Each piece works independently or together.

By ByteBot Share TanStack Start hit Release Candidate status in early 2026 as a full-stack React framework that challenges Next.js’s dominance with a radically different philosophy: client-first, not server-first. Built on TanStack Router, Vite, and Nitro, it delivers server-side rendering, streaming, and server functions without forcing developers into the server-centric mental model that’s become React’s default. If Next.js’s opinionated approach or React Server Components feel heavy-handed, TanStack Start offers breathing room.

“When I first tried it, I thought I was missing something because it was so easy, it just worked.”

React Server Components remain confusing for many developers. TanStack Start sidesteps that complexity entirely by treating SSR as an enhancement, not the foundation. You write client code that runs on the client. Server functions handle backend logic. The separation is clean.

To let an external cache make the freshness decision, set routerOptions.defaultPreloadStaleTime or routeOptions.preloadStaleTime to 0. Settled preload data then becomes immediately stale in the Router,

It does not promise every CommonMark edge case, arbitrary async plugin chains, automatic linkification, MDX evaluation, or a bundled sanitizer.

The tree is plain objects and arrays, so it can cross a server boundary, sit in a cache, feed a search index, or render later through HTML, React, or Octane. Parsing doesn't trap the content inside a framework or an async plugin pipeline.

Most Markdown APIs make the rendered output the product. TanStack Markdown treats the parsed document as the durable part.

I don't want to reach for an architecture to hide a dependency problem, I'd rather make the dependency small and let content be content.

Signal-native adapters implement it with their framework primitives and can keep option reads in the same reactive graph.

The core reactivity depends on a small shared atom contract provided by @tanstack/store:Signal-native adapters implement it with their framework primitives and can keep option reads in the same reactive graph.Store-backed adapters keep options synchronized during render; in React, granular rendering is opt-in through selectors and Subscribe.

The primary purpose of a headless library like TanStack Table is to provide the correct state management core, but we needed to rethink how much of the core library worked under the hood and connected to each framework's reactive model.

Every framework adapter's reactivity system was completely overhauled in Table V9. With table state now built on TanStack Store, each adapter can connect the framework-agnostic core to its framework's native reactive model instead of working around assumptions inherited from React. This is especially significant for signal-based frameworks because table atoms now connect much more directly to signals, refs, runes, and tracked values, making those adapters more performant overall and bringing them much closer to true signal-based rendering. TanStack Table V9 now ships ten dedicated framework adapters, plus the framework-agnostic @tanstack/table-core.

You want to understand exactly what your code is doing

You value type safety and explicit control

Your app is highly interactive

The core bet: developers know their apps better than frameworks do. Server rendering is an optimization you opt into where it makes sense. The framework should give you powerful primitives and get out of your way.

TanStack Start optimizes for developer control and correctness: type safety everywhere, explicit over implicit, composable primitives, and deployment freedom.

Split transactions: When summing or counting transactions, filter "is_parent": false to avoid double-counting. A split parent holds the total amount, and its children hold the individual parts — including both counts the total twice.

Here the example: Transaction: Hotel (7 nights) | Category: Holiday | Subcategory: accommodation

Categories that are not currently needed can be hidden by using the down arrow by each category name. An example is budgeting savings for a large cost (e.g. washing machine). After the purchase is made, the category can be hidden.

Your budget is not static, so there will be times when you do not have enough budgeted for your spending. When one of your categories is overdrawn, increase the budgeted amount for that category so it is 0 or greater.

Generally, banks do not let their users share their transaction data with third party apps in a secure, standardized way. Instead, you have to give your bank account credentials directly to third parties.

The SimpleFIN Bridge is a success when it is turned off because banks have implemented SimpleFIN themselves or a universal, better alternative.

We want to be in a world where banks let their users share their transaction data with third party apps without giving those apps your bank account credentials!

Zero-based budgeting requires every expense to be justified for each period, starting from a "zero base."

ZBB involves analyzing and justifying each cost

Wayland does not let a client register global hotkeys, so you bind the wrapper to a key combo in cosmic-comp.

Each iteration went through a planning process and was developed on a separate branch. All plans are available for review under .claude/plans. An iteration history is also kept.

The app was developed with Claude Code through a series of planned iterations. My original plan was to use this project as a way to learn libcosmic app development. However, as I dug in, it quickly became apparent that developing an app switcher would cover much more than a regular desktop application. It would involve a deeper review of the compositor, its protocols, and how it works with Wayland. These aren't topics I'm familiar with. Furthermore, cosmic-comp and cosmic-protocols are still in rapid iteration, and documentation is minimal. All of this meant that, even as a seasoned developer with a few Rust projects under my belt, it would take more time than I had on my hands. As someone who's been developing software for more than 25 years, I am of course concerned about and wary of AI slop. My hope here is that process and oversight will minimize it (though of course I may not catch everything). Each iteration went through a planning process and was developed on a separate branch. All plans are available for review under .claude/plans. An iteration history is also kept.

However, it’s important not to confuse the concept of being scammed (social engineering) with being hacked (technical breaches).

Can be self-hosting scammed? Yes, absolutely. In fact, many scammers use self-hosting solutions. They set up their own servers and trick users (often targeting seniors) into installing custom clients that connect to their self-hosted servers. However, it’s important not to confuse the concept of being scammed (social engineering) with being hacked (technical breaches). Self-hosting, when properly secured, remains a safer and more secure solution compared to SaaS, as it is harder to hack.

For remote access to your Pop!_OS machine, I recommend RustDesk for personal and home-lab use in 2026. I have been using it on my own machines for months and it works flawlessly on Wayland.

au·to·trophan organism that is able to create it's own food from sunlight or chemicals (like plants and algae!)

An AI model, also called a neural network, is essentially a mathematical lasagna, made from layer upon layer of linear algebra equations. Each equation represents the likelihood that one piece of data is related to another.

Consider uninstalling the malicious Stylish extension. In 2016, with no input from the userbase, through some guy, pretending to be an independent developer, it basically was sold to a shady web analytics company, Similarweb. Since then, it is actively sharing your entire non-anonymized browsing history demo with them, assuming you ever clicked on one of the flashy "Agree" buttons. It initially did this without even asking for consent, and was banned from extension stores afterwards. Currently, it still breaks store policies, yet is not banned for unknown to me reasons. This website only works with the Stylus extension, which is an open-source privacy-friendly fork of the now-malicious Stylish extension.

Cloudflare is an evil company which uses legitimate traffic to hide nefarious clients. They also have a history of taking no responsibility for hosting illegal content. Plus, they’re overselling their “privacy” stance. How can anyone trust a company that lets their clients host “Adobe Flash Updaters” in the name of “free speech”? Or that never answers questions unambiguously?

Markdown became the default AI output under three assumptions. All three made sense in 2022. None of them hold in 2026.

Premise 1: Humans hand-edit content. Markdown was designed for people who write and revise their own text. That’s how blogs, docs, and READMEs still work. But agent output is different. You send a prompt. The agent generates a 2,000-word analysis, a code review, a project plan. You read it, maybe share it. You almost never open it in an editor and start rewriting paragraphs. The format’s core value proposition — easy to edit by hand — no longer matches the use case.

Premise 2: Content is small. A 500-word blog post renders fine in Markdown. A 3,000-word agent-generated implementation plan with architecture decisions, trade-off tables, and code samples does not. Past about 100 lines, Markdown becomes a wall of text. No navigation, no collapsible sections, no way to jump to the part you care about. Thariq’s observation is blunt: “Nobody really reads a Markdown file longer than 100 lines.”

Premise 3: Output is read-only. The old workflow was linear: prompt, generate, read, close. But the agent era is pushing toward something different. Users want to interact with the output: filter a table, adjust parameters, compare options side by side, export a subset, feed the result back into the next prompt. Markdown can’t carry interaction. It’s a one-way street.

The second wave was knowledge workers. Through the 2010s, tools like Notion, Obsidian, and Jekyll built their entire editing experience around Markdown. It became the default for wikis, note-taking, and static sites. The appeal was the same: human-readable AND machine-parseable. You could write it in any text editor and render it anywhere.

Yeah, and it's like -- that is an interesting potential possibility, I guess... Talking to people about partnerships, or "Do we want to have an official hosted version?", open sourcing is a little bit risky, because somebody could technically go along and do that. We talked about licensing issues, maybe there is a license that I could use to prevent that... But really, when it comes down to it, after talking to people, there's not really -- I think you burn more goodwill with weird licensing issues like that, than trying to prevent that. \[01:00:01.19\] So I think the best thing to do is just to get out in front. And if we're going to do that, then we just need to do this sooner rather than later, and prevent some side company from trying to take this and do that.

I was pretty burned out on just the whole... I just want my time at night back, because I have a full-time job, too.

Yeah, I think it's just the loneliness problem. I think there was almost such a point where the thought of having 3,000 users or 800 - I just literally cannot support that by myself.

Yes, I had a Slack that was pretty active, and now I've moved to Discord when I open sourced it, because Discord is just way, way better.

and it's like "You're almost making half of what I make." But when you think about it as a business income stream, suddenly if I have to hire one developer even just part time, there goes almost all that money. That's not even enough to hire a developer part-time, somebody who would be really skilled enough to work on Actual. And so money from a business perspective, having to set aside $20,000 to invest in development for a couple months - if you're a business and you can't afford that, that's a huge problem. But 20k for a personal -- you know, if I'm about to buy something for 20k, I agonize over that for week. I hate buying cars, because they are so freakin' expensive. But 20k in business money is nothing, right? I mean, for most businesses, that shouldn't be anything, if you're doing it right. So 3k - a lot of people were like "Dude, you're giving up $3,000 a month." To me, it's just like, you don't understand the burden, because I was lonely, and the next thing I really needed to do is either find a co-founder, which I couldn't do, or hire somebody else to help development. Like, properly hire; don't outsource some cheap labor. Properly hire somebody to help development. And $3,000 a month is not anywhere close to being able to hire somebody out. So you're kind of stuck in this awkward middle phase, which I think happens with bootstrapping, right? You've got to really bear through that awkward phase where you make enough money, to get to the point where you can start hiring out.

So it wouldn't have felt good to have this small exit, plus maybe alienate some of your most loyal users... I understand why that is not the best route. And so open source is the path that you chose. And of course, that's the opposite of alienation. It's inviting everybody in, right? To a certain degree. You do have the ones that don't want to set it up and can't code, and all that. But instead of spending your goodwill with a sale, you're almost buying goodwill with open sourcing, because now you're just giving a gift to the world.

I bet if I had sold, it would have been even... Like, there's a lot of people who reacted to open source where they are worried about not being able to set things up themselves, and it totally makes sense, because they're not technical users, but they're happy for that direction. I think if I had sold, it would have been a very similar response from a lot of people, where they're going to leave the app... But it would have been like an angry response, which - I mean, honestly, a lot of apps do that. Things change and things happen. But I think it would have -- I think there's a lot of trust in there that it's like I've been saying I'm in it for the long haul, and then you turn around and sell it... Which, you know, it would have been my right to do to be honest, but it still would have pissed off a lot of people, and I didn't really feel like dealing with that.

But development is expensive. So unfortunately, that is the cost there, where it probably requires very highly skilled developers to actually really be able to dig into the hard parts of this.

Totally. It's actually the most scalable architecture you could possibly have, because you don't even need a server.

It is a cross-platform, local-first API that works on the web as well... Getting that to work required significant investment and novel research, requiring new ways of doing things.

But to be honest, somewhat groundbreaking innovations to use SQLite in a persistent way in the browser, but it stores the file chunks in IndexDB, and it actually blows away IndexDB's performance. It's a significant undertaking; we're dealing with writing C code to optimize file disk access, so that it works better with IndexDB. So it's not something that's a typical SaaS app that a company is going to come in and buy, and then suddenly like "Let's ramp it up to get 20,000 users and just scale it out in all of the ways that are normal, that we're used to."

one thing that I would say is if you are building a product, or if you are trying to achieve anything, try to do it quickly, and make quick decisions, and move fast... Not just so that you will make progress fast, but when something kind of slows down... Like, if I was a year into Actual - when you've been doing something for a while, it's really easy to just keep that pace. It's really hard to -- I don't know, if I have a problem on my house, like fixing a toilet that's been broken for a year, there's something about the psychology of it that's like "I'll fix it next week. It's already been a year, I'll fix it next week." Whereas if it broke yesterday, I'll probably go out to Lowe's this weekend, come back, it's a 15-minute fix, and I'll fix it, right? There's some psychology there that's interesting, where if you aren't acting on things fast, they just sort of become this pile of responsibility behind you that you just sort of ignore. I think that's one thing that sort of happened, to me at least. It's like, "I've already been working on this for so long... Let's just keep building a couple more things."

The start of the idea is if you've got a broken window, you can fix it right now. Because if you leave that broken window broken, I think it's a signal, and maybe a signal to the outsiders that no one's taking care of this house, or something. But also, it's kind of like, you know, then the next thing breaks, and you're like, "Well, the window's already broken, too." It's kind of like "Well, I'm already not taking care of this, and so..." Adam Stacoviak: \[32:18\] Yeah. Jerod Santo: Oh, here, we've got "Neglect accelerates the rot faster than any other factor." That's Jeff Atwood talking about the broken window theory, so I've found it a little bit. So there's a little bit of that going on there. I definitely understand how that is. Adam Stacoviak: It's a metaphor that leads to the disorder, essentially. If you have a broken window here, in this house - well, then your neighbor is gonna be okay with their lawn being not so good. Or your neighbors don't want to deal with their landscaping, so you don't... It's almost like osmosis, in a way. You sort of do things based upon other things happening around you... It's disorder that happens because of other disorder. It's kind of like that.

...and it's not getting features for a month or two... It's very hard to context-switch between development and all the other stuff, because you've got to be on top of that sales, developing those relationships with those bloggers to get featured... It's hard to do it.

Right. Well, especially when you are a developer, and you love that part, the first move is to hire the not-that-part; the other parts. Either the things that you aren't as good at, or the things that you don't like to do.

I finally found a good service, who helped me find a personal assistant, a virtual assistant, who helped manage support. And she was amazing. I was feeling very guilty, because I had, I think, 200 unread emails that I just lost track of over a month or so, that I hadn't responded to. In two days, she brought that down to zero. Just answered everything, and categorized everything, and just really cleaned it up. And then at that point, she would take on support, and that was a huge help. So that was good. It's not development, where it was super, super-expensive. I think you can find places to pull off and get help that isn't going to drain your whole finances like hiring other developers, or something.

I tried out a contributor model where people were just interested; people would ask a lot, actually, "How can I help contribute?" And so I'd bring on some people, and then obviously, as just a free contributor, they do a little bit of work and then they just kind of fade away. It's just how it is. And then at that point, it's something even else more for me to manage, helping them, getting them running, sort of mentoring them and helping

I would love to take Actual, if somebody was going to do this, is to focus less on the zero-based budgeting - and if any Actual users are listening to this, don't freak out; that's always going to be there. But there's totally a capability for this to be a more generic transaction management tool

it turns out you can actually edit rules, and do complex rules, and you kind of can unpeel the layers

For example, local-first. The app is just -- Jerod Santo: Fast. James Long: ...fast by default. I mean, it's no question. That's the first thing that everybody always says when they try the app. They feel it. They feel their data sitting right there on the hard disk. And I don't have to think about it. I can run 100 queries straight from the frontend, not even in the backend. So there is kind of a frontend and a server process running, but that process is always a local process. I can run queries, send them to the server, and I can fire off 100 right from the frontend, and you don't feel that at all. It's one of those things that just changed the whole experience of the app. There's no - you do a bulk edit of your 3,000 transactions in an account, because you're doing something crazy and you're really restructuring things, and you bulk-edit things to add a note to these 3,000 transactions, so you select them all and type "archived". It happens in 200 milliseconds. Whereas you go to any other app and there's this huge cliff of anything that's outside of the ordinary workflow that they've specifically manually optimized - suddenly it has to span their five database clusters, and it takes you'll see the loading spinne

So that was Mint's deal. That's what really put them on the scene. And then they started just layering on kind of upsells and other things. I eventually was like "Yeah, I'm done with Mint", because it got yucky for me as a user.

When entering new transactions, and when exporting transactions to CSV, having multiple subcategories with the same name, such as "Work Expenses", but different Parent Groups, such as "Me vs Partner" causes confusion.

I'd vote against this change. It can be really useful as-is for certain groupings. For example, I often type "inc" when categorizing to bring up the income categories. The current behavior is also how it works in YNAB: The "which are not selectable" point in the original comment is valid though. YNAB handles this by shrinking the text size of the category group names, as you can see in the above screenshot. Maybe this Issue could be modified to be a UX change (shrinking the category group name text) instead of a functionality change, such that it's clear the category group names are no selectable.