TypeScript in 2026: What We Wish We'd Known Before Going All-In

TypeScript has won. The question is no longer whether to use it but how to use it well, and the gap between teams that use TypeScript effectively and teams that just use TypeScript is larger than most people realize.

The Things That Are Genuinely Great

Refactoring confidence. This is the real killer feature. Large-scale refactors that would have been terrifying in plain JavaScript — renaming a type, changing a function signature, reorganizing a module — are now mechanical. The compiler tells you everywhere you broke something. This alone has probably paid for itself ten times over in avoided production bugs.

The Things That Will Frustrate You

The any escape hatch is a footgun. Teams that use TypeScript permissively — liberal use of any, type assertions everywhere — end up with worse code than JavaScript. You get the overhead of types without the safety. Strict mode from day one is not optional if you want TypeScript to actually work.

What We’d Do Differently

Start stricter. We gradually tightened our tsconfig over two years, and the migration pain was real. Starting with strict: true, noImplicitAny: true, and strictNullChecks: true from the beginning is the right approach. The initial friction is nothing compared to retroactive strictness enforcement.