Jest Creator’s New Toolchain Delivers 10× TypeScript Speed and Swaps ESLint

TypeScript Rewritten in Go?

In a blog post titled "Fastest Frontend Tooling for Humans & AI", Christoph Nakazawa—author of Jest, Metro Bundler, and former Yarn maintainer—reports that his Go‑based TypeScript compiler @typescript/native-preview (tsgo) speeds up type checking by about tenfold and catches errors missed by the original JavaScript implementation.

Migration steps are straightforward:

Install @typescript/native-preview.

Replace the tsc command in your project with tsgo.

Enable experimental tsgo support in VS Code.

He has migrated over twenty projects ranging from small libraries to million‑line applications, but notes that tsgo is still in preview and ecosystem compatibility should be evaluated before a full rollout.

Formatting: Is Prettier Being Replaced?

Prettier has long dominated frontend code formatting, yet Nakazawa points out its performance drawbacks. He recommends Oxfmt, a Rust‑based formatter from the oxc ecosystem, which includes built‑in import sorting and Tailwind CSS class ordering and is an order of magnitude faster than Prettier.

Because Oxfmt does not yet handle Markdown, JSON, or YAML, a pragmatic approach is to use Oxfmt for JavaScript/TypeScript files and fall back to Prettier for other file types.

ESLint → Oxlint: A Real Competitor Appears

ESLint has lacked a true alternative for years. Nakazawa argues that Oxlint is the first viable replacement because it can run existing ESLint plugins directly via a shim mechanism, and it even supports TypeScript‑aware linting through the oxlint‑tsgolint plugin.

He also open‑sources a configuration package @nkzw/oxlint-config built on five principles:

Only errors, no warnings : fix or ignore.

Strict, consistent style : prefer modern syntax.

Bug prevention : disable known pitfalls.

Speed first : drop slow rules.

Don’t get in the way : remove subjective preferences.

What the Complete Toolchain Looks Like

Beyond tsgo, Oxfmt, and Oxlint, Nakazawa’s recommended stack includes:

pnpm – praised as the fastest, most space‑efficient JavaScript package manager.

Vite – described as the fastest, most stable, and most extensible frontend development platform.

React + React Compiler + Async React – the UI layer with the latest compiler optimizations and asynchronous rendering.

npm‑run‑all2 – runs multiple npm scripts in parallel without interleaved logs, useful for monorepos.

ts‑node + nodemon + swc – a server‑side hot‑reload setup that Nakazawa found faster than alternatives like tsx or bun.

AI Perspective: Faster Tools Empower Faster Agents

The subtitle’s "& AI" is intentional. Nakazawa argues that a faster toolchain not only improves developer experience but also accelerates AI agents such as Claude Code or Cursor, whose type‑checking, linting, and formatting steps become the new bottleneck. Reducing type‑checking from 30 seconds to 3 seconds lets an AI agent perform several additional fix‑and‑test cycles per session.

He even provides a migration prompt template for LLMs to automate the entire toolchain switch.

Critical Considerations

1. Maturity : tsgo, Oxfmt, and Oxlint are still evolving; their plugin ecosystems lag behind Prettier and ESLint, so large production teams should pilot them in non‑critical projects first.

2. Learning Cost : Replacing the TypeScript compiler, formatter, and linter simultaneously requires updating CI/CD pipelines, editor configs, and team conventions.

3. The "Best Toolchain" Myth : The proposed stack fits Nakazawa’s high‑performance, TypeScript‑heavy use case. Teams prioritizing ecosystem stability may prefer a gradual migration.

Overall, Nakazawa contends that by 2026 the benchmark for frontend tooling will shift from "good enough" to "fast enough"—a shift that benefits both human developers and AI agents.

Reference: Christoph Nakazawa, "Fastest Frontend Tooling for Humans & AI", https://cpojer.net/posts/fastest-frontend-tooling, 2026‑02‑19.