FE/BE - Unite Them!

We're rewriting a large system at Anedot. We're using rails as a backend to develop a public API which will be consumed by a bleeding edge TanStack app on the frontend, but is built to be consumed by anyone. Classically teams are split by frontend and backend specialization. This can lead to "model drift" as conceptual models of the domain that exist within the rails system can become a deeply different beast from the frontend UI models and user flows. Over time this "drift" means the frontend lacks understanding of the system capabilities and the backend loses sight of the purpose of it all - features delivered to the user. Over time, FE ends up: thinking in API responses, not domain concepts optimizing for screens, not system behavior missing invariants and edge cases enforced in the backend discovering issues only after integration That’s not a tooling issue, it’s an information flow problem. In most teams, this is exactly what happens: the frontend becomes a consumer of shapes rath