Shadcn/UI now defaults to Base UI instead of Radix

I’m leaning towards vendoring for all my new projects.

Grabbing an off-the-shelf UI library is easy in the short term, but it’s usually overcomplicated, implements things I won’t ever need, is hard to tweak if/when you want to distinguish your app from the thousand others using the same library, and when you do decide to upgrade it, all your tweaks break in subtle ways.

What I think would be the best approach is building your own UI library. You own it, you get to reuse it across different projects and maintain the same visual style (if desired), and you add features when you need them.

> that should just be ticking up a version number.

Ah, but it's rarely just that in many systems. It can only be just that if the component library does exactly what you want. Unfortunately, it happens quite often that component doesn't entirely do what's needed.

People bolt on extra CSS to the components all the time. Two lines of CSS is very tempting if the alternatives are a few hours of work at least. But those two lines need to be verified against every new feature of the component library.

Do those two line fixes a lot, and upgrading becomes A Project.

Mantine is brilliant, I can build anything in it quickly and then extend it or completely customize the theme or individual components, but there is a learning curve. I would not call it a giant learning curve.

I don't like the copy paste. Rather use lower-level abstractions for the UI if I know I have to make modifications.

If you don't need to make any changes, it should be very simple to just upgrade by replacing the components. And if you need to make changes then well it's not gonna work with a traditional UI library.

> now there is an upgrade ai agent for something that should just be ticking up a version number.

If a component as basic as a button or a list view ever requires an “upgrade”, something is fundamentally wrong to begin with. HTML5, ARIA, etc. aren’t cutting edge technologies that the ecosystem still needs time to figure out. This should be pull once and forget.

Bigger issue ,every app that use shadcn use 100% same. I still have to figure how people differentiate their brand using shadcn.

I highly prefer a copy and paste approach. The less npm installs the better.

Martine just straight up sucks.

Vendoring your components gives you the best of both worlds. You get a full component library but retain the ability to modify them as you want.

Your AI agent claim doesn't make any sense either. When upgrading normally your component just gets rewritten on disk. When switching from radix to base ui, a more comprehensive approach is needed.

How about leveraging llms to produce deterministic codemods? You can then iterate on this by running the codemods and using other deterministic guardrails, feeding the results back into the llm to improve the codemods?

Sorry, what is codemod here?

I think the two complement each other perfectly and will continue to do so. I keep writing AGENTS.md files for soft rules and custom linter rules for hard ones which IMO is the best of both worlds.

My main gripe with Shadcn and, well, most UI libraries nowadays, is that they are reinventing the wheel for like a thousandth time.

I’m trying out Ark UI on a side project. They do have some genuinely useful components, like tags input: https://ark-ui.com/docs/components/tags-input

They have a tabs/“segment group” component with a nice animated active element indicator which would probably be tricky to implement: https://ark-ui.com/docs/components/segment-group

And then they also have stuff like overcomplicated “click to copy” button and a <details> reimplementation: https://ark-ui.com/docs/components/clipboard, https://ark-ui.com/docs/components/collapsible

All with a verbose markup that renders as a div soup.

[delayed]

What's the difference?

All of these component libraries look the same.

> PrimeNG had a licensing change recently

Both attempts [1] to surface this on HN failed but if you are using a PrimeTek component library you need to be aware of this change.

PrimeNG, PrimeReact, and PrimeVue are all going fully closed source and ongoing licencing will be $800 per developer seat in 2027. [2]

The previous repos have been archived. [3]

PrimeFaces remains open source but it's now developed and maintained by independent volunteer developers who are not employees of PrimeTek.

[1]: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=The+Next+Chapter+of+PrimeTek

[2]: https://primeui.dev/nextchapter

[3]: https://github.com/primefaces/primeng

I'm building Lily Design System as a response to Shadcn and similar systems not yet being available directly for multiple stacks including Svelte, Angular, Nunchucks. It's all free open source. If you want to send me your feedback, suggestions, etc. I can easily add things to Lily.

https://lilydesignsystem.github.io

Base UI is more low-level, a lot less opinionated and doesn’t force you into certain layouts. This of course makes it more complex to use, but that doesn’t matter if you’re using shadcn components because they’re doing that work for you.

So essentially they look and operate the same as Radix components at the shadcn level but you have low-level control later on should you need it.

Yeah instead of this slop a simple table explaining the tradeoff would have been far superior.

Personally I'd prefer React Aria; I don't have the patience to try understand why suddenly everyone is rushing to adopt Base UI instead of Radix which itself was once suddenly the thing everyone rushed to instead of Stitches.

Having a library not in anyway related to that to me feels like a big pro.

I have found React Aria to be very good. I really like how its a set of hooks, a set of premade components using said hooks, and I like how you can choose bits of either approach for your own components. Some of the hooks are very useful.