What are the actual specific skills or prompting patterns I need to master with Claude Code to get it to generate high-performance React components rather than just generic boilerplate that barely passes a linter? I have been messing around with the new CLI tool for this dashboard project I am building for a small fintech client in London and honestly the deadline is breathing down my neck for next Friday so I need to get fast. I read online that you should just feed it your entire component library for context to maintain consistency but then I saw a thread on Reddit saying that actually confuses the model and leads to hallucinated props that tank performance with unnecessary re-renders. I tried asking it to optimize a data-heavy table yesterday and it just threw useMemo at every single variable which felt like a lazy band-aid fix rather than a real architectural change. Is there a way to guide Claude to think about things like state colocation or windowing without me having to manually write half the code anyway? I am stuck between people saying - just give it more context - and others saying - keep snippets tiny - and I am just not seeing that snappiness in the UI that I need for this specific use case...
Ngl pattern-first prompting is amazing! Just tell it to use TanStack Table v8 for windowing. It totally saves lives!
Quick reply while I have a sec! Totally get the frustration with the useMemo spam... its so annoying when it tries to be smart but just makes the code messy. One trick I love is feeding it specific design patterns from the official docs. Instead of the whole library, give it the interface specs for TanStack Virtual v3 or React Window 1.8.10. This forces Claude to think about the DOM footprint instead of just React state logic! You should also explicitly prompt for a component-first architecture where the data fetching stays close to the leaf nodes. It prevents those massive re-render chains that kill fintech dashboards! Honestly, checking out the Kent C. Dodds blog for state colocation examples and pasting those into the prompt works wonders... its amazing how much better the output gets when you define constraints first. Love it when a plan comes together!
Can vouch for this