Abstract
Front-end has long been about reactivity frameworks and client-side state management. However, the alpha in these is receding. The next frontier, with much bigger gains across UX, DX and AX lies in extending reactive state management to the server with local-first apps built on a sync engine architecture.
Local-first apps built on sync are instant to use, always work and naturally support realtime collaboration. Eliminating stale data, loading spinners and manual data wiring. It's an ideal architecture for building AI apps and agentic systems where you have multiple users and agents collaborating on the same state. And the switch from imperative data fetching to declarative sync also makes LLM generated code more maintainable and suitable for production apps.
This talk introduces the principles of local-first and sync engine architecture and shows you how you can adopt these patterns today using TanStack DB, a new reactive client store for building super fast apps on sync that's now built directly into TanStack.
