Libraries
Libraries tools are for solving common problems without writing them from scratch — the kind of work every indie hacker eventually hits and would rather not build from scratch. 7 tools are listed here, each picked and written up individually rather than pulled from an affiliate feed. Axios is usually the first one people try: the HTTP client people reach for out of habit — interceptors and automatic JSON handling that raw fetch still makes you write yourself. date-fns takes a different angle — immutable, tree-shakable date functions that dodge the footguns of hand-rolled date math without dragging in Moment.js's weight. And Lodash is worth a look too: the utility belt every JS codebase quietly leans on — unglamorous, but it saves you from reinventing array and object helpers. Every listing below includes the actual tradeoff, not marketing copy, so you can pick based on what you're building instead of what ranks highest in a sponsored roundup elsewhere.
The HTTP client people reach for out of habit — interceptors and automatic JSON handling that raw fetch still makes you write yourself.
Immutable, tree-shakable date functions that dodge the footguns of hand-rolled date math without dragging in Moment.js's weight.
The utility belt every JS codebase quietly leans on — unglamorous, but it saves you from reinventing array and object helpers.
Formerly Framer Motion, spun out on its own — the library that makes React transitions look hand-tuned instead of bolted on.
Handles server-state caching, retries, and refetching so well that a lot of apps end up not needing a global state library at all.
TypeScript-first schema validation that infers your types straight from the schema, so you stop writing the same shape twice.
A state store you can wire up in five lines, no providers or boilerplate — the anti-Redux for apps that never needed Redux.