Files
agent-skills/skills/vercel-react-best-practices/rules/rerender-lazy-state-init.md
Jason Woltje d9bcdc4a8d feat: Initial agent-skills repo — 4 adapted skills for Mosaic Stack
Skills included:
- pr-reviewer: Adapted for Gitea/GitHub via platform-aware scripts
  (dropped fetch_pr_data.py and add_inline_comment.py, kept generate_review_files.py)
- code-review-excellence: Methodology and checklists (React, TS, Python, etc.)
- vercel-react-best-practices: 57 rules for React/Next.js performance
- tailwind-design-system: Tailwind CSS v4 patterns, CVA, design tokens

New shell scripts added to ~/.claude/scripts/git/:
- pr-diff.sh: Get PR diff (GitHub gh / Gitea API)
- pr-metadata.sh: Get PR metadata as normalized JSON

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-02-16 16:03:39 -06:00

2.0 KiB

title, impact, impactDescription, tags
title impact impactDescription tags
Use Lazy State Initialization MEDIUM wasted computation on every render react, hooks, useState, performance, initialization

Use Lazy State Initialization

Pass a function to useState for expensive initial values. Without the function form, the initializer runs on every render even though the value is only used once.

Incorrect (runs on every render):

function FilteredList({ items }: { items: Item[] }) {
  // buildSearchIndex() runs on EVERY render, even after initialization
  const [searchIndex, setSearchIndex] = useState(buildSearchIndex(items))
  const [query, setQuery] = useState('')
  
  // When query changes, buildSearchIndex runs again unnecessarily
  return <SearchResults index={searchIndex} query={query} />
}

function UserProfile() {
  // JSON.parse runs on every render
  const [settings, setSettings] = useState(
    JSON.parse(localStorage.getItem('settings') || '{}')
  )
  
  return <SettingsForm settings={settings} onChange={setSettings} />
}

Correct (runs only once):

function FilteredList({ items }: { items: Item[] }) {
  // buildSearchIndex() runs ONLY on initial render
  const [searchIndex, setSearchIndex] = useState(() => buildSearchIndex(items))
  const [query, setQuery] = useState('')
  
  return <SearchResults index={searchIndex} query={query} />
}

function UserProfile() {
  // JSON.parse runs only on initial render
  const [settings, setSettings] = useState(() => {
    const stored = localStorage.getItem('settings')
    return stored ? JSON.parse(stored) : {}
  })
  
  return <SettingsForm settings={settings} onChange={setSettings} />
}

Use lazy initialization when computing initial values from localStorage/sessionStorage, building data structures (indexes, maps), reading from the DOM, or performing heavy transformations.

For simple primitives (useState(0)), direct references (useState(props.value)), or cheap literals (useState({})), the function form is unnecessary.