I believed “stateless = simple”

Like many frontend engineers, I bought into the idea early.

No shared mutable state.

No surprises.

Just clean functions and predictable flows.

So I decided to go all in and build a frontend that was as stateless as possible.

It looked clean — until it wasn’t

At first, everything felt disciplined.

Then the app grew.

And “stateless” slowly turned into:

State duplicated across hooks

State mirrored in the URL

State cached, then reconstructed

State synchronized across tabs

State re‑derived after refreshes

State invalidated in multiple places

Nothing was explicitly wrong.

But nothing felt simple anymore.

Debugging became the real problem

Fixing a single UI bug meant answering questions like:

Is this value stale or recomputed?

Did an effect run twice?

Is this coming from cache or network?

Why does refreshing “fix” it?

Where is the source of truth?

The complexity wasn’t visible anymore — it was emergent.

The realization that changed everything

Stateless…