When you go API-First , your OpenAPI contract should be the single source of truth across your entire stack.

Unfortunately, most community-managed generators TanStack Query generators force you into an uncomfortable tradeoff: either live with rigid, inflexible hooks, or write everything by hand and lose the benefits of type safety.

This article shows a more flexible approach.

Use @apical-ts/craft to handle all the heavy, error-prone OpenAPI work: parsing, schema generation, response unions, parameter serialization, and type inference. Then keep a thin, custom generator in your own repository for the TanStack Query layer.

The result: fully typed, clean, and highly ergonomic hooks that you fully own and can evolve as your application needs — without upstream dependencies or duplicated contract logic.

When working with TanStack Query and you want to generate hooks from an OpenAPI contract, you have a few options:

implement hooks by hand trying to match the contract types

use a community-managed open…