Stop Hand-Rolling Chat UIs: Streaming LLM Tokens Into React Native Without the Jank
A chat screen looks like a weekend project: a list of bubbles and a text input pinned to the bottom. In React Native, it is one of the hardest things to ship well, because it sits on top of the two most hostile surfaces in mobile development: the software keyboard and a scrolling list that changes size while you're looking at it.
We're putting LLMs into everything now, and there is still no good drop-in chat view for React Native. You glue together an aging library with strong opinions, or you hand-roll it. I hand-rolled it. Then I made the LLM stream its replies token by token, and the whole thing fell apart in a way that took a week to understand.
This is the story of that break, and the fix, which arrived with suspiciously good timing as a library release three months ago.
The App
I work on...
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