Auditing React State & Hooks with Math (shadcn-admin Case Study)

The "Aha!" Moment

Most React developers view state as a collection of variables. We look at a snapshot in time and ask, "What is the value of isLoading right now?"

But state isn't a static value. It's a signal that moves through time.

I spent my holiday break building react-state-basis, an architectural auditor that treats every React hook as a vector in a 50-dimensional space. After my last post about the theory, I realized one thing: Engineers don't want more console logs. They want an Oscilloscope.

So, I built the Temporal Matrix HUD.

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The Matrix: Visualizing Dimension Collapse

When multiple state variables update in perfect sync, they aren't adding new information - they are redundant dimensions. In Linear Algebra, we call this Linear Dependence. In React, we call it Architectural Debt.

I implemented a Zero-Overhead HUD (using Canvas API and requestAnimationFrame) that visualizes your state transitions as a real-time heatmap.

How it works:

1. Vectorization: Every state variable is mapped to a row.
2. Temporal Window: The HUD shows a sliding window of the last 50 "ticks" (20ms windows).
3. Redundancy Detection: Every 5 ticks, the engine calculates the Cosine Similarity between all active vectors.
4. Visual Alert: If similarity exceeds 0.88, the rows in the HUD turn Red.

If it pulses together, it belongs together. If your matrix is full of red blocks, you're storing the same data in multiple places. Move it to useMemo.

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Case Study: Auditing shadcn-admin

To test the engine, I audited the popular shadcn-admin template - a gold standard for clean shadcn/ui implementations.

The Results:

• Efficiency Score: 100%. The mathematical rank of the system was perfect. Every state variable was a unique source of truth.
• The "Causal" Catch: Even in perfect code, the Causality Detective flagged a sequential sync leak in the use-mobile.tsx hook. It detected a "Double Render Cycle" where state was being manually synchronized within an effect.

This is the power of Basis: it finds execution-level bottlenecks that are invisible to static analysis and standard DevTools.

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Key Features in v0.2.4

• React 19 Ready: Full support for use(), useOptimistic(), and useActionState().
• Causality Detective: Tracks the chain of updates from useEffect to state setters to find unnecessary renders.
• Circuit Breaker: Forcefully halts infinite loops before they lock up your browser thread.
• Ghost Mode: In production, the engine resolves to "Zero-Op" exports. Zero bundle bloat. Zero performance penalty.

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Why Math?

We’ve spent a decade "guessing" why our React apps feel sluggish. By treating state transitions as vectors, we move from "voodoo debugging" to formal verification.

If you can measure the Rank of your state-space, you can prove that your architecture is optimal.

Check it out on GitHub:

👉 https://github.com/liovic/react-state-basis

I'm a solo dev and would love to hear your thoughts.

Let's discuss in the comments.