Most real-time examples focus on the happy path.
Messages flow. The UI updates. Everything looks fine.
But real systems fail in boring ways:
connections drop, clients reconnect, and suddenly you have to care about duplicates and state consistency.
To make this easier to reason about, I built a terminal-based chat application using Ink.
Why the terminal?
Because it strips away browser-specific complexity while still giving you a UI. There’s no React hydration, no hidden reconnection logic, no optimistic rendering masking what’s happening underneath.
You can actually see:
when a connection drops
when the client reconnects
that messages resume without duplication
In this example, the focus is reconnect handling.
When a client reconnects, the RelayX SDK handles duplicate messages internally, so the application logic stays simple.
The chat itself is intentionally basic. The goal isn’t features, it’s visibility into real-time behavior.
I documented the full example here, including the code and setup:
👉 https://docs.relay-x.io/examples/cli-chat-app/what-youre-building
If you’re building chat apps, dashboards, or anything event-driven, I’m curious how you’re handling reconnects today.
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