Vite Frontend Tooling taste

# Vite Frontend Tooling taste of a fast-feedback web developer
- Start new single-page apps and component playgrounds on Vite with the official framework plugin instead of a custom webpack setup. Confidence: 0.85
- Keep `vite.config.ts` in TypeScript with `defineConfig`, and keep it short enough to read in one screen. Confidence: 0.80
- Run type checking separately with `tsc --noEmit` in CI and in a watcher, since Vite only strips types and never checks them. Confidence: 0.95
- Use path aliases sparingly, define them once in `tsconfig.json`, and mirror them in Vite with a plugin such as `vite-tsconfig-paths`. Confidence: 0.75
- Expose only `VITE_`-prefixed environment variables to client code and never put secrets in them. Confidence: 0.95
- Type `import.meta.env` in a `vite-env.d.ts` file so missing or misspelled variables fail at compile time. Confidence: 0.80
- Configure the dev server proxy for backend APIs instead of enabling permissive CORS on the backend just for local development. Confidence: 0.85
- Use Vitest for unit and component tests so tests share the same config, transforms and aliases as the app. Confidence: 0.90
- Lazy-load routes and heavy widgets with dynamic `import()` and let Rollup split chunks, rather than hand-tuning `manualChunks` early. Confidence: 0.80
- Inspect bundle size with `rollup-plugin-visualizer` before releases and treat a large new dependency as a review topic. Confidence: 0.75
- Import assets through the module graph so they get hashed file names, keeping `public/` for files that need fixed URLs like `robots.txt`. Confidence: 0.85
- Set an explicit `build.target` that matches the browsers you support, instead of relying on the default. Confidence: 0.70
- Generate source maps for production builds and upload them to your error tracker rather than serving them publicly. Confidence: 0.80
- Prefer native CSS features and CSS modules or Tailwind over heavy CSS-in-JS runtimes in Vite projects. Confidence: 0.70
- Keep the plugin list small and remove plugins that duplicate built-in features such as JSON imports or CSS handling. Confidence: 0.80
- Use `vite preview` to smoke-test the production build locally before deploying, since dev and build use different pipelines. Confidence: 0.85
- Pin Vite and plugin versions in the lockfile and upgrade them together, reading the migration guide for major versions. Confidence: 0.85
- Use library mode with `vite build --lib` plus a declaration generator when publishing a component package, and mark peer dependencies as external. Confidence: 0.75
- Fix slow cold starts by checking `optimizeDeps` and large barrel files before blaming Vite itself. Confidence: 0.70
- Fail CI on build warnings about circular imports or missing exports instead of letting them pile up. Confidence: 0.65