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The State of React: October 2026

· 15 min read
Alex Smith
Alex Smith
Software Engineer
The State of React, October 2026, drawn as a synthwave radio-show cover: a glowing cyan React atom orbits a striped setting sun, equalizer bars rise along a pink horizon over a neon grid floor, THE STATE OF sits in gold above REACT in cyan and white, LIVE SET reads in the top left corner, EP. 003 in the top right, and a caption along the bottom reads October 2026, React component libraries, compared

Two kinds of change landed in the table this month. Some of it shipped, mostly from Mantine and from bestax. More of it is me fixing cells the September edition had wrong, and this time the table marks those apart.

Snapshot: October 2026

This edition reflects each library as of October 13, 2026 and covers everything since the August and September edition. The full matrix lives on its own comparison page, and the latest edition of The State of React always has the freshest data.

The State of React: August and September 2026

· 11 min read
Alex Smith
Alex Smith
Software Engineer
The State of React, August and September 2026, drawn as a synthwave radio-show cover: a glowing cyan React atom orbits a striped setting sun, equalizer bars rise along a pink horizon over a neon grid floor, THE STATE OF sits in gold above REACT in cyan and white, B2B SET reads in the top left corner, EP. 002 in the top right, and a caption along the bottom reads August + September 2026, React component libraries, compared

This one's late. August came and went without an edition, so this is a combined August and September issue of The State of React, and I'm sorry for the gap.

Snapshot: September 2026

This edition reflects each library as of September 26, 2026 and covers everything since the July edition. The full matrix now lives on its own comparison page, and the latest edition of The State of React always has the freshest data.

Escape an Unmaintained Bulma Library

· 13 min read
Alex Smith
Alex Smith
Software Engineer

Escape an Unmaintained Bulma Library, drawn as pixel art: a robot wheels a cart stacked with component crates labeled Card, Hero, and Form out of a dim cobwebbed doorway marked 2022 and toward a glowing teal archway marked Bulma v1

So you've got a React app built on react-bulma-components. It works. It also hasn't had a release since 2022, it targets Bulma 0.9, and every v1 feature you actually want (CSS variables, dark mode that just happens, the Grid components) sits on the far side of a rewrite nobody has budget for.

Accelerated Evolution for Agent Skills

· 10 min read
Alex Smith
Alex Smith
Software Engineer

Accelerated Evolution for Agent Skills, drawn as pixel art: a builder robot hands a glowing bestax cartridge across a workbench to a grader robot whose clipboard scorecard reads 95.2

Ask a coding agent for a dashboard in a library its training data barely saw, and one of two things happens: it quietly switches to the popular library it has seen a million times, or it stays loyal and invents props that don't exist. We fought that with agent skills, playbooks that teach an agent our library. This is the story of what came after: proving the skills actually work, then making them better the way evolution would, just faster.

Fighting AI Training Bias

· 9 min read
Alex Smith
Alex Smith
Software Engineer

Fighting AI Training Bias, drawn as pixel art: a robot coding agent turns away from a toppling stack of identical gray cartridges under a most popular marquee toward a glowing bestax cartridge seated in a retro console whose screen reads llms.txt

A coding agent can't one-shot a library its training data barely saw. Ask one for a dashboard in an under-represented library and you get one of two failures: it quietly reaches for the incumbent it has seen a million times, or it stays loyal and invents props that don't exist. bestax's answer is to make the real, current API machine-legible so one shot is enough, and this post is everything that ships today.

Form Library Agnostic

· 9 min read
Alex Smith
Alex Smith
Software Engineer

Form Library Agnostic, drawn as a pixel art RPG character creation screen: a name field with a blinking cursor, a class picker with the cursor on Mage, stat sliders for STR, DEX, and INT, and a green status row reading form libs loaded: 0, ready.

A form in bestax-bulma is plain React: state goes in, props come out, and nothing new sits in between. There's no bundled form library and none is coming; the library's job ends at rendering Bulma correctly, so your form state stays yours. By the end of this post you'll have a validated signup form built with nothing but useState, you'll see where the validation library of your choice plugs in, and you'll know where every escape hatch is.

v5.0.0: One CSS, Any Prefix

· 8 min read
Alex Smith
Alex Smith
Software Engineer

One CSS, Any Prefix, drawn as pixel art: a glowing bestax cartridge wired to three identical buttons captioned .button, .bestax-button, and .acme-button, while a faded bulma- cartridge crumbles into loose pixels at the edge of the frame

In June, bestax-bulma v5.0.0 shipped exactly one breaking change, and it was a deletion: 3 files touched, 22 lines removed, 0 added. If you never imported versions/bestax-bulma-prefixed.css, you won't feel a thing.

The Floor Is React 18

· 5 min read
Alex Smith
Alex Smith
Software Engineer

The Floor Is React 18, drawn as a pixel art lava level: tiles labeled 16 and 17 sink into the lava while the React atom hops between a solid brick floor labeled React 18 and a floating 19 platform

In June, bestax-bulma v4.0.0 dropped support for React 16 and 17. That's the whole release: one breaking change, no new components, and if you're on React 18 or 19 you won't feel a thing. Here's why I moved the floor anyway.