This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by Anju Karanji
Yo! tips imaginary cowboy hat
Welcome to yet another AI chatbot tutorial. I know, I know — groans from the back row. C'mon - hang on. This one’s different. Why you ask? Because it’s my very first tutorial blog. And you know what they say: you never forget your first… 😉
From Rejection to Experiment
Picture this: I’d just ended a long drawn-out interview loop. After several rounds of interviews, the rejection email landed in my inbox with all the tenderness of a tax audit.
Ouch.
Here’s the upside, though — the take-home assignment planted an idea. The task was to build a “mini” version of their visual page builder: the usual drag-and-drop editor hooked up to an iframe preview. Standard fare.
Except my brain got stuck on the tests. While writing them, I couldn’t stop thinking about Cypress. You know how Cypress runs tests in a little Broadway show right in front of you? And then it hit me: what if building the page wasn’t about dragging or typing… but talking?
Cue lightbulb moment. 💡
Which brings us here — my first tutorial blog. You might groan, I might stumble, but lol, life’s short anyway.
I won't bore you with the standard page builder setup - it's the usual React component tree managing an iframe preview. You can check the repo if you're curious about those details. Let's jump to where it gets interesting: making it listen.
Making the Page Builder Listen
I wanted the computer to just… listen. Enter the Web Speech API. Set it up, capture speech, spit out text. Easy. The fun wasn’t the setup — it was what came after. My page builder was suddenly transcribing my words of wisdom in real time.
Cool, right? Except my laptop started heating up like it was mining Dogecoin.
Naturally, I assumed: “Aha, speech recognition is melting my CPU.”
Turns out… nope. 🙃
The Real Culprit: React Being React
What was actually frying my laptop? Functions recreated on every render, causing my poor useEffect hooks to spin in circles.🌀
Classic React problem. Normally, you sprinkle in a little useCallback, and if you miss a dependency, you hope github copilot will remind you, and move on. But this time, I thought:
What if I let the new React Compiler do the heavy lifting?
React Compiler to the Rescue
So I turned on the experimental compiler in next.config.js:
// next.config.js
const nextConfig = {
experimental: {
reactCompiler: true
}
};
I deleted all my manual memoization.
The results? My render times dropped from 20.8ms to 2.1ms. No useCallback, no headaches, and no pain in the back manual optimizations.
The compiler looked at my sendMessageToHost function, saw it had no dependencies, and just… memoized it for me. Automatically.
It was like having a really perceptive friend who gets you the wine bottle before you ask.
What's Next
So far we’ve got:
A page builder that listens to speech
A laptop that isn’t melting anymore
A React compiler quietly flexing in the background
That means:
Parsing commands like “add a button with text ‘Click Me’”
Handling chaos like “make it blue” when there are five buttons
Mapping natural speech to component props without losing your mind
Basically, it’s less talking and more connecting.
Closing Reflection
Sometimes rejection really is redirection. That job I didn’t land? It pushed me to build something I probably wouldn’t have thought of.
And that’s the thing about side projects: the best ones aren’t carefully plotted on a whiteboard. They’re reactions — little sparks from the messy parts of life.
Mine just happens to come with a cowboy hat and react compiler 🤠
This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by Anju Karanji
Anju Karanji | Sciencx (2025-09-27T01:57:03+00:00) Talking to My Code: React Compiler Saves the Day. Retrieved from https://www.scien.cx/2025/09/27/talking-to-my-code-react-compiler-saves-the-day/
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