Best of shadcn — February 2026

  1. 1
    Article
    Avatar of infoqInfoQ·9w

    Shadcn Releases Visual Project Builder

    Shadcn launched a visual project builder accessible via `npx shadcn create` that lets developers customize their entire project setup—including themes, component libraries, icon sets, and design systems—before writing any code. The tool supports Next.js, Vite, and TanStack Start frameworks, offers real-time design previews with options for Radix UI or Base UI foundations, and generates a custom command with all selected parameters. This design-first approach eliminates repetitive manual setup work and aligns with shadcn's philosophy of giving developers complete code ownership by copying components directly into projects rather than distributing them as npm packages.

  2. 2
    Article
    Avatar of Marmelabmarmelab·9w

    Building an Admin App with TanStack Start and Shadcn

    Step-by-step guide to building a CRUD admin interface using TanStack Start, Shadcn/ui, and the Shadcn Admin Kit. Covers project setup, connecting to a REST API via a data provider pattern (using JSONPlaceholder as a demo backend), mapping API endpoints to resources, and scaffolding list, detail, edit, and create views using Guesser components before customizing them.

  3. 3
    Video
    Avatar of awesome-codingAwesome·8w

    The best devs delete code...

    Good software development is fundamentally about removing complexity, not adding it. Using the shadcn radio button as a case study, the post illustrates how modern frontend stacks often replace native browser capabilities with multiple abstraction layers that recreate what the browser already handles natively — grouping, keyboard navigation, accessibility, and form submission. This pattern, called a shallow module, adds cognitive overhead without delivering deeper functionality. Drawing on Joel Spolsky's law of leaky abstractions and John Ousterhout's deep vs. shallow modules distinction, the argument is made that senior developers spend more time pruning codebases than writing new code. With AI-generated code increasing the volume of low-quality output, the ability to simplify and curate a codebase will become an increasingly critical skill.

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