React Status Issue 459: January 23, 2026

#459 — January 23, 2026

Together with

Remotion Releases Agent Skill for Creating Videos

Remotion is a toolkit for creating videos with React that's been around for several years. You compose elements with React and render MP4s of the results. The only issue is, it takes a lot of skill (and code) to make something good.

A few days ago, the Remotion team launched (on X) a set of 'agent skills' (read them here) for tools like Claude Code to create high-quality videos with prompting alone. As an example, here's a log of the session used to create Remotion's own promo video for the feature.

Remotion's post got ten million impressions, and people are generating videos en masse. I've created a few and am impressed by the potential. Several YouTubers have ▶️ created videos ▶️ showing off what they've made and ▶️ sharing advice. (If you use X, search for 'remotion' and you'll be flooded with examples.)

And even if AI isn't your thing, Remotion is still worth checking out.

Drag-and-Drop React Form Builder with Full Data Control — SurveyJS offers a no-code form builder in React that integrates seamlessly with any backend. Design questions, configure validation and logic, and collect data in JSON without SaaS limitations.

SurveyJS sponsor

The Incredible Overcomplexity of the Shadcn Radio Button — A radio button is just a radio button, right? No. Paul digs into the complexity UI frameworks can often introduce in the name of accessibility and consistent cross-browser behavior. This provoked a lot of discussion on social media and Hacker News, where Dan Abramov popped in to make some points.

Paul Hebert

IN BRIEF:

🇫🇷 React Paris is taking place this March 26-27 in Paris, France — though you can also attend virtually.
🕹️ Tiny Harvest (iOS App Store, Google Play Store) is a 'cozy farming' mobile game and a good example of what you can achieve with React Native and Expo.
A developer floats the idea of putting inline assertions into your React code, rather than having separate tests.
The Boring JavaScript Stack has hit version 1.0 – it's an 'opinionated full-stack JavaScript project starter' built around Sails, Inertia, Tailwind CSS, and your choice of Vue, React or Svelte.

Inside Turbopack: Building Faster by Building Less — If you’re working on a large codebase, faster hot reloading, better scaling, and persistent caching are all quite desirable. Here’s how these things came about in Turbopack.

Shew, Woodruff and Koppers (Vercel)

📄 Adapting Library Logic for React Compiler – From the lead maintainer of TanStack Form. Corbin Crutchley

📄 Improving React Performance with useMemo and useCallback Jakub Andrzejewski

📄 Building a Next.js 16 PWA with True Offline Support Jude Miracle

🛠 Code, Tools & Libraries

Shimmer From Structure: Auto-Generate 'Shimmer' Skeletons From Your Components — A shimmer/skeleton library that automatically adapts to your component’s runtime structure and DOM, with no pre-defined skeleton structure needed.

Olebogeng Mbedzi

Build Faster Dashboards with TimescaleDB — 95% compression, continuous aggregates, full Postgres. Query billions of rows instantly. Start for free.

Tiger Data (creators of TimescaleDB) sponsor

React Native Windows v0.81 Released — RNW is now aligned with React Native 0.81.5, the React Native DevTools are supported, and much more. There’s also a full example app to show off RNW’s features (in both Paper and Fabric architecture versions) to demonstrate how to migrate between architectures.

Ramya Oruganti (Microsoft)

💡 The 'old architecture' is set to be deprecated in React Native Windows 0.82, so it's time to migrate if you're still using it.

json-render: AI-Generated UI with Guardrails — This feels a bit odd to me at first, but it’s interesting to see Vercel experiment with the idea of UI elements generated automatically from a user's prompts. Try it for yourself with the live demo on the homepage.

Vercel

react-native-bootsplash 7.0: Show a Splash Screen During App Startup — It’s now ‘edge-to-edge’ by default on Android.

Mathieu Acthernoene

Rockpack 7.1 – Tool to quickly spin up a new React app with SSR, bundling, linting, and testing.
React Admin v5.14 – Provide a backend API and build a SPA frontend for it.
Recharts 3.7 – D3-based charting library for React. (Demos.)
Next.js 16.2.0 Canary 5 and Next.js 16.1.4
Rolldown 1.0 RC

📰 Classifieds

Clerk components now auto-match your shadcn/ui theme. Light/dark mode, custom colors, Tailwind v4—no manual variable mapping needed.

🔐 Auth0 for AI Agents more securely connects your AI agents to apps and data, applying the correct user permissions in every scenario. Try it out.

📢 Elsewhere in the ecosystem

Some other interesting stories in the broader landscape:

🤖 Mastra is an AI framework for TypeScript built by the team formerly behind Gatsby. Version 1.0 has just been released which makes it possible to bundle agents and workflows into existing Express, Hono, Fastify, and Koa apps using several new adapter packages.
With Electron 40.0, the popular cross-platform desktop app framework upgrades to Chromium 144, V8 14.4, and Node 24.11.1.
📊 HTTP Archive has released its latest Web Almanac for 2025 packed with raw stats, trends, and observations about the state of the Web over the past year, covering areas like WebAssembly, performance, and ever-increasing page weight.
A fun read about the techniques involved in rendering graphics using ASCII text.
OK, it's nothing to do with our React, but it's neat to see ReactOS celebrate its 30th birthday. It's an open source Windows-compatible OS, and after thirty years it can run quite a lot of (admittedly mostly XP-era) Windows applications.