954: Fullstack TanStack! The Scoop with Tanner Linsley

Live from GitHub Universe, Wes and Scott talk with Tanner Linsley about the latest from TanStack, including TanStack DB’s local-first syncing, new routing ideas, and fresh perspectives on server components and “magic” directives. They explore performance, incremental adoption, and what’s next for the rapidly growing TanStack ecosystem — plus a few spicy takes along the way. Show Notes 00:00 Welcome to Syntax! 01:12 What’s new in the TanStack universe? 01:57 Introducing TanStack DB: local-first sync engine 05:17 How syncing and transactions actually work in TanStack DB 07:03 Next.js 16 Workflows: durable functions and the directive debate 08:46 Brought to you by Sentry.io 09:41 Tanner’s case for fewer “magic directives” 12:36 TanStack’s approach to React Server Components 14:30 The momentum of leading an ecosystem 15:38 Top-secret TanStack project in the works Hit us up on Socials! Syntax: X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Wes: X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Scott: X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Randy: X Instagram YouTube Threads

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Scott Tolinski?

  Welcome to Syntax Today. We are live at GitHub Universe and we have Tanner Linsley in the box.

• 0:06Wes Bos?

  Look who we found!

• 0:07Scott Tolinski?

  Yes, look what we have here.

• 0:08Wes Bos?

  Watering the floor.

• 0:09Speaker 02

  Hello, hello.

• 0:10Wes Bos?

  Taking all the merch, drinking all the drinks.

• 0:12Speaker 02

  I don't have that low, you know that low range you've got on yours?

• 0:16Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, I do.

• 0:16Wes Bos?

  I don't have that either.

• 0:17Speaker 02

  I'm jealous.

• 0:18Scott Tolinski?

  What's up?

• 0:19Wes Bos?

  No, I got the...

• 0:20Speaker 03

  Hey, hey guys! You like JavaScript?

• 0:22Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 0:23Speaker 02

  Oh, hey, I've got some cool JavaScript tips for ya.

• 0:26Scott Tolinski?

  Wow, that's great, guys.

• 0:27Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 0:28Speaker 03

  Oh, shit.

• 0:30Wes Bos?

  Uh, so Tanner is the creator of TanStack Everything. You've probably used TanStack Query.

• 0:37Speaker 02

  Almost everything.

• 0:39Wes Bos?

  TanStack, almost everything.

• 0:40Speaker 02

  This is the first year that libraries are out that I didn't create.

• 0:44Wes Bos?

  That you haven't even touched before, yeah.

• 0:45Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 0:46Wes Bos?

  That's, uh, it's more of a TanStack team now, right?

• 0:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 0:50Wes Bos?

  You guys got like lots of, lots of folks. We had Corbin on the podcast, what, maybe a year, a year and a half ago? And he was telling us about how you write libraries to work with multiple things.

• 1:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:02Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, it's so funny. Yeah, when I talked to Corbin at the thing, I was like, I think it was about like four years ago we had you on the pod. I looked it up, it was 2024. I'm like, oh, okay.

• 1:10Wes Bos?

  Four years ago, yeah.

• 1:11Scott Tolinski?

  Time flies, yeah, right?

• 1:12Wes Bos?

  Since we've last talked, I know that you're cooking on stuff right now and we're gonna have you on for a proper podcast. But we thought we would just grab you in to chit chat. But like, you've been, you've been cooking, right? Like, you've, uh, what have you been working on?

• 1:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, we've been cooking some fun stuff. I have been heads down on TanStack Start.

• 1:30Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 1:30Speaker 02

  And Router lately. Me and Manuel Schiller have mostly been working on that. Sam Willis and Kyle Matthews from Electric have been putting a ton of work into TanStack DB.

• 1:42Wes Bos?

  Oh, that's, so that's your like sync engine, local.

• 1:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:46Wes Bos?

  Local first. Scott absolutely loves this stuff.

• 1:49Scott Tolinski?

  Oh, yeah. We were talking about it last night.

• 1:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, like, like if I wasn't doing Router and Start, like, I would be working on that, because I'm just so excited about it.

• 1:57Wes Bos?

  Tell us about about like what that is.

• 2:00Speaker 02

  So it is like a sync engine, but it's only it's only the client part of it. So you you set up what we call collections.

• 2:09Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 2:09Speaker 02

  And they're basically tables. And you can you can then query those collections using like a queries in text that you're used to from like drizzle or. Like it's it's a first class query engine, you know, you can do joins, you can do where clauses, you can do really fun tricky things. And that's all powered by this differential data flow system behind the scenes in the browser. So it's really, really fast to run these queries on these collections.

• 2:35Wes Bos?

  Okay.

• 2:36Speaker 02

  But those collections can be powered agnostically. So you could shove data into those from React Query, from a Web Socket, from IndexDB. So you can you can push data into these collections from anywhere.

• 2:49Wes Bos?

  Okay.

• 2:50Speaker 02

  So it's like you get to start building your own sync engine.

• 2:53Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 2:53Speaker 02

  Which is what makes it incrementally adaptable.

• 2:55Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 2:56Speaker 02

  Which is very important.

• 2:57Wes Bos?

  That's what we were talking about with zero.

• 2:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:59Wes Bos?

  Which is what I'm using for everything. You are have to have either your Postgres set up already and and be committed to that. Or you have to build from scratch.

• 3:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:10Wes Bos?

  So that incremental adoption piece is much more difficult.

• 3:14Speaker 02

  Oh, man.

• 3:15Wes Bos?

  With the syntax side, it wouldn't be possible because we're not on Postgres unless.

• 3:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:18Wes Bos?

  Yeah, we moved to Postgres. One of the benefits, if we peel back, one of the benefits to to a tan stack query is that like you just needed on a sync function.

• 3:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:27Wes Bos?

  You know, and you didn't, it's not like it had to be a fetch call, not like it had to be this like weird signature or whatever. It just needs to be a synchronous function and past that you don't give a shit how what happens. Is that the same thing with the sync engine?

• 3:41Speaker 02

  Same spiritual idea.

• 3:43Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 3:43Speaker 02

  You do need a little bit more.

• 3:45Wes Bos?

  Okay.

• 3:46Speaker 02

  So yes, you need async functions to, you know, you need to be able to push your data into the collection.

• 3:51Wes Bos?

  Yep.

• 3:51Speaker 02

  And that can happen through a REST call setup you've got, like you can use React Query to push data in there.

• 3:58Wes Bos?

  Okay.

• 3:58Speaker 02

  Or you can set up a socket or a live stream of events coming in. So that's the first thing you need is to be able to push data in. The second thing you need is it is schema based. Because you need to be able to have strict type safety, but not just that, you need to be able to query this stuff like a table and do joins on IDs and joins on things. So.

• 4:16Wes Bos?

  Oh, yeah.

• 4:17Speaker 02

  It takes a schema, so it's it's not relational, but you can treat it like that. So let's see, data schema. That's really it. That's all you need.

• 4:27Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. And I think one thing that people really don't realize is just how transformative the speed can be when you're working in these local cache systems. It is so fast and I feel like I'm always constantly talking about this.

• 4:46Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 4:46Scott Tolinski?

  And like a year from now, people are going to be like, this is the fastest thing.

• 4:51Wes Bos?

  I feel like you've been so early to this stuff and not everyone realizes how good it is.

• 4:53Scott Tolinski?

  Because it's so shockingly fast. That's why I'm excited for the TanzTech DB. I'm excited for this incremental adoption. I would love to use it on syntax. And like, just know that like that, that speed in which you're able to load things from your local data cache with, with syncing happening behind the scenes or whatever that process is, is transformational.

• 5:17Wes Bos?

  What does the actual syncing look like? You know, like I understand like querying, you're pulling data down, but like what happens when you need to have a mutation or whatever?

• 5:24Speaker 02

  So the transaction, there's, there's a transaction framework built into it.

• 5:29Wes Bos?

  Okay.

• 5:29Speaker 02

  And a lot of that is automatic. So when you work with individual collections, you know, you're doing an insert or a deletion or, or an update. A lot of those transactions are managed for you around these common actions you can take.

• 5:42Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 5:42Speaker 02

  And all you have to do is supply the implementation details of those common actions. And you can also create your own, but like insert, update and delete, you, you just supply the implementation details for those. So you may have a collection that's powered by a really old crappy REST API.

• 5:59Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 6:00Speaker 02

  And when you call those three functions, you gotta go in and actually make a fetch call with the data and do the thing, right? But once you set that up one time, you can then go back to your, your business logic, your application layer, and you can interact with that collection as if it's synchronous. You can just mutate properties, you can delete and add things. And behind the scenes, it's batching and doing all those fetch calls for you.

• 6:24Scott Tolinski?

  And that gives you...

• 6:25Wes Bos?

  Easy control over permissions and stuff like that because you're not changing your API, right?

• 6:29Speaker 02

  Right.

• 6:30Wes Bos?

  Yeah, yeah, that's a problem that I know Zero has been trying to solve in different ways of permissions, of which if you're not having to adopt a whole new thing, right?

• 6:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 6:39Wes Bos?

  You're just using your API.

• 6:40Speaker 02

  Which, and I got a rep, Electric.

• 6:42Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 6:42Speaker 02

  Which is where Kyle and Sam are from.

• 6:45Wes Bos?

  Yeah, Kyle's been on that for a while now, yeah.

• 6:47Speaker 02

  But by using long polling, right?

• 6:50Wes Bos?

  Mm-hmm.

• 6:50Speaker 02

  You get to reutilize all your normal authentication flows because it's just REST. It's just HTTP, right?

• 6:57Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 6:58Speaker 02

  So you don't have to invent something new for sockets and go through kind of that charade.

• 7:02Wes Bos?

  Excited to try that out. Let's switch gears a little bit. NextJS last week launched, NextJS 16 launched a workflow with the use workflow directive, which is a little bit magic, right? I haven't really caught up with what everybody's saying about it, but I know, I know you've had some thoughts on it. Can you give us the scoop as to what you think about that?

• 7:24Speaker 02

  The workflow stuff itself is actually really exciting.

• 7:27Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 7:27Speaker 02

  Like, we've got to be honest with ourselves that durable execution is really exciting.

• 7:32Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 7:33Speaker 02

  No matter what you're using.

• 7:35Wes Bos?

  So like, maybe pause just for a second. Like, the idea with the, for the audience listening, the idea with a workflow is that you can like, you can have an async function and you can just like, pause that function for 42 days.

• 7:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 7:47Wes Bos?

  Or you can have like, multiple steps, or you can say like, come back and sleep for 30 minutes and come back and check if this thing. And it's really cool. Like, I've used the Cloudflare durable objects and their workflow. Big fan of that. And like, all of your memory, all of your variables, all of that sort of just like, is reinstated. There's like InJest, there's a couple of like, other startups in that space. So it's, it's great, especially for agents where you're like, come back in half an hour, but you don't have to like, save your variables to database or anything like that. So it just like, seals it up.

• 8:17Speaker 02

  But it's a hot space.

• 8:18Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 8:18Speaker 02

  And it's useful. It's really cool to do that.

• 8:20Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 8:21Scott Tolinski?

  And if you want to see all of the errors in your application, you'll want to check out Sentry at sentry.io/syntax. You don't want a production application out there that, well, you have no visibility into in case something is blowing up and you might not even know it. So head on over to sentry.io/syntax. Again, we've been using this tool for a long time and it totally rules. All right.

• 8:46Speaker 02

  I think the interesting part that kind of was trending a lot on Twitter and social media these, the last few days has been around their usage of directives.

• 8:54Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 8:54Speaker 02

  For kind of setting that up. And on, on one hand, you look at it and it's like, it does look really innovative and cool to be like, oh, look what you had to do with these other APIs and nesting things in functions and, and setting them up to, to be resilient.

• 9:08Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 9:09Speaker 02

  We've replaced all that with just these kind of magic directives. So on one hand, it does look really great and, and man, it sells well. Even when I saw it, I was like, oh, wow, that looks really cool.

• 9:19Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 9:19Speaker 02

  But for me personally, I, I, I think that we kind of have a directive problem. Just, we're getting a little obsessive about using them for everything.

• 9:28Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 9:28Speaker 02

  So I, I decided to collect some of my thoughts on directives in general, uh, not just about use workflow, but just about all of the directives that we've kind of chosen to adopt over the last couple of years and, and put them into a little blog post that I did. So, yeah.

• 9:41Wes Bos?

  And like, give us the, the Cliff Notes of that. Like what should we be using instead of these magic directives?

• 9:48Speaker 02

  So from my perspective, people are saying that magic directives are the way to indicate that some kind of transformation is happening under the hood by a compiler.

• 9:57Wes Bos?

  Okay.

• 9:57Speaker 02

  And I, I would say that we've actually been doing that for a long time without directives.

• 10:03Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 10:04Speaker 02

  With just functions and, and other things and.

• 10:06Wes Bos?

  JSX.

• 10:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, JSX.

• 10:07Wes Bos?

  Yeah, right. Yeah.

• 10:09Speaker 02

  And for me, I'd say, you know what? Let, let's use, yeah, sure. Let's invent ways to do compiler tricks because it's all tricks.

• 10:15Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 10:15Speaker 02

  None of it's real JavaScript. So if we're going to invent tricks, my opinion is that they should at least be, uh, future-proof for type safety.

• 10:24Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 10:25Speaker 02

  And especially room to grow because I, I actually messaged this to David Kershed today and I said, hey, I actually thought of you because directives are kind of like the use state Boolean.

• 10:37Wes Bos?

  Oh.

• 10:37Speaker 02

  Of, of compilers, right? And I know that he would be like, oh my gosh, use state Boolean, right?

• 10:43Wes Bos?

  Yeah, that's, that's David K. Piano. You say anything about state machines.

• 10:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, right.

• 10:46Wes Bos?

  He arrives.

• 10:47Speaker 02

  But in the same spirit, a directive is kind of just like this Boolean. You only have the one choice. It's either there or it's not.

• 10:54Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 10:54Speaker 02

  And, and if, if anybody wants to try and expand that into, okay, well now we have this special. Colon syntax.

• 11:00Wes Bos?

  Mm hmm.

• 11:01Speaker 02

  Now there, now there's directives, but there's also magic functions that change how those directives are.

• 11:05Wes Bos?

  Directive arguments.

• 11:06Speaker 02

  Right.

• 11:07Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 11:07Speaker 02

  I'm like, okay, we're starting to invent JavaScript again.

• 11:10Wes Bos?

  Right.

• 11:11Speaker 02

  And in that case, I would just say, well, why don't we just use wrappers? Maybe they're not pretty and maybe they, maybe they don't scream, hey, a compiler is doing something here.

• 11:20Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 11:21Speaker 02

  But at least they're type safe, they're traceable, they have an import, you can follow them back to a spec, hopefully, you know? Even JSX looks pretty magical, you know? But, but you can, you can go and say, oh, what's the Pragma being used here?

• 11:36Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 11:36Speaker 02

  You can trace that Pragma back to, oh, here's the actual transforms that are happening under the hood. So, you know, there's been a lot of talk about creating standards and wanting to share work across the ecosystem. And, and I love that. And there's, there's some leeway personally, like for things like use server and use client. You know, I like the spirit of that, like trying to share and make it as useful as possible for everybody.

• 12:00Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 12:00Speaker 02

  At the same time, I'm building a meta framework and I'm not using use server. I mean, we, we support it.

• 12:06Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 12:06Speaker 02

  We support it, but I don't want to use it because I want type safety and I want all this nice stuff. So, you know, I, I'm kind of on the, on the team of like, you know, if you want to try and create standards, that's great. Let's make them open and, and make them easy to customize and save. But I just feel like going down this directive route is going to create a lot of standard proliferation.

• 12:28Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 12:28Speaker 02

  And I don't like that.

• 12:29Wes Bos?

  Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That, that tracks for sure. Cool. Well, we'll link up the blog post below and people can check it out.

• 12:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, sure.

• 12:36Wes Bos?

  Love hearing that. What other, what other spicy takes you got?

• 12:39Speaker 02

  Um, you know, we're, we're working on React server component support.

• 12:44Wes Bos?

  Okay.

• 12:44Speaker 02

  For TanStack Start. And we're going to support the normal flavors of server components, how everybody wants to use them. But we have kind of a, a special take on server components that I think is going to be a little bit unique. I'm not going to share too much because we're still in the prototype stage.

• 13:00Wes Bos?

  Okay.

• 13:01Speaker 02

  We, we know that it, it works, but we just don't have it ready to show off. But the teaser is that, uh, we've been talking about server components for a long time now.

• 13:11Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 13:11Speaker 02

  But in reality, what they really are, or what we've seen is server elements.

• 13:18Speaker 02

  When you think about returning a server component from next or wherever these days, you're not returning a component to the client or, or, you know, to render. You're returning an element that's been rendered.

• 13:29Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 13:30Speaker 02

  And I've, I've always had this dream of being able to actually send a component back to the client and, and render it with slots and inversion of control. That inversion of control is so important to me because I don't like to assume that the server knows how to do everything.

• 13:48Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 13:48Speaker 02

  I want to be able to send it a task to do this thing on the server that only it can do on the server, but then come back to me and let me continue to do things on the client that I want to do.

• 14:00Scott Tolinski?

  Okay. Fill in the little.

• 14:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, fill in the, fill in the gaps.

• 14:03Scott Tolinski?

  Okay.

• 14:03Speaker 02

  Just from what I said there, you can probably put the pieces together what we're working on, but it's, it's going to be a, a different, a different implementation of server components than I think a lot of people have, are used to.

• 14:16Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 14:16Speaker 02

  And it opens up a path to using server components that doesn't require the use client directive for a majority of use cases. There's still use cases for that.

• 14:29Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 14:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:31Scott Tolinski?

  Man, yeah. And, and it does feel like there's so much momentum behind you and your projects right now. Does that feel, is it, is it reaching you in that same way that there is a lot of heat on what you're doing, positive heat?

• 14:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, and it's exhausting because a lot of it, I mean, I know that we've written some blog posts and, and we've put some new projects out there, you know, but a lot of it is, is feels like it's being thrown at us from social media and the community. Like I'd say 95% of the stuff that I've been reading on Twitter is just coming from random people that we've never met or anything. They're just, they've just decided to use Tanstack as this podium to, to speak their thoughts, which is really cool, you know? In, in some regards, they're, they're doing our marketing work for us.

• 15:20Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 15:20Speaker 02

  On the other hand, it makes me nervous, you know? I want to make sure that it's a positive spin that. People are being nice and kind and upholding what I would call like the Tanstack tenants of, you know, always making sure we're being nice and, and being positive.

• 15:36Wes Bos?

  That's great. I like that. What else Tanstack? What else would you, is Tanstack CMS one day? What, what are, what are the areas that you would love to touch and something that you will never want to touch?

• 15:46Speaker 02

  We, I don't, I do not want to make a CMS or, or, or an ORM.

• 15:52Wes Bos?

  No, Tanstack ORM, okay.

• 15:54Speaker 02

  No, we do have one more library that we are prototyping right now. It's in the very early alpha, like pre-alpha stages.

• 16:05Wes Bos?

  Okay.

• 16:06Speaker 02

  But I, I cannot say anything about it.

• 16:08Wes Bos?

  What, what area is it in? Me and Scott are gonna guess.

• 16:11Speaker 02

  I can't even hint to it.

• 16:12Wes Bos?

  Somebody in the comments will know. Please go in the comments below, drop what you think it is and then find the ones and upvote the most ones.

• 16:19Speaker 02

  But I, I will say that we,

• 16:21Wes Bos?

  Tanstack Icons.

• 16:22Speaker 02

  We are working with a lot of people in the community. So usually we'll just build something internally.

• 16:28Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 16:28Speaker 02

  First, and then we'll just like, here, we built something new. This project has a big scope. A lot of, a lot of people are behind it from outside of the Tanstack community. So we've got a huge working group channel in our Discord with a bunch of people who have been invited to this working group.

• 16:44Scott Tolinski?

  Interesting.

• 16:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 16:44Wes Bos?

  Tanstack format, Tanstack V plus?

• 16:50Speaker 02

  But, but we think it's, we think it's gonna be very foundational, um, something that I think people have asked us even saying, we would like you to have this. We would like you to build this. And I ask them why? And a lot of, some of it comes down to ownership. They just trust us to do the right thing.

• 17:07Scott Tolinski?

  It's gotta feel good.

• 17:08Speaker 02

  With, with software. And some of it is technical. A lot of it is technical where it's just like, hey, we're using this tool. And it gets the job done, but it's kind of the only choice we have and it, it could be better. And we think that the Tanstack.

• 17:22Wes Bos?

  It's a bundler.

• 17:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 17:24Scott Tolinski?

  It's a techs there. We're just gonna, yeah.

• 17:26Wes Bos?

  Tanstack code.

• 17:27Speaker 02

  I'm just gonna say sure to all of that so that there's a bunch of.

• 17:30Wes Bos?

  Tanstack agent.

• 17:32Speaker 02

  So that there's a red herring in there for basically everything.

• 17:34Wes Bos?

  It's gotta be a, a bundler with AI built into it. Tanstack Sparkle.

• 17:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's a, it's Sparkle. Tanstack Sparkle is coming.

• 17:45Wes Bos?

  Cool. Well, I'm really looking forward to that. All right. Well, thank you so much for coming in. Appreciate it. And we'll have you back on the show once you got some more to say.

• 17:53Speaker 02

  You bet.

• 17:53Scott Tolinski?

  Thanks so much, Tanner.

• 17:54Speaker 02

  Yep.