Serious question: how widespread and actually used in production is Zod?

Honestly, it made things worse for me. JavaScript isn’t a statistical typed language and TypeScript already is something, where due to compiler issues I just use “any”.

Zod has its conventions and JavaScript ain’t Java.

So Zod is also hard to read and debug. It is type conversion to type conversion - bloat, not JavaScript.

Even Pydantic looks tamed compared to Zod.

So how do you use it? Which conventions? Only for validation at certain steps? APIs?

I stopped using TanStack because it got to meta for me and AI as well.

Tests are needed anyway, I rely on TypeScript only now.

I mostly use it for runtime validation for API responses. Found it pretty easy to use. I try pretty hard to avoid "any" in the code, and it's helped clean things up a good bit, which is crucial as we've introduced LLMs into our workflows.

I don't love Pydantic, though. It's probably a skill issue, but it just feels messier/clunkier than Zod's parsing options.

I use it heavily for form validation on the client and the server and it plays very well drizzle in my opinion. In the past I also used it a bunch for validating responses from a product API as it was not always guaranteed that the data had the agreed shape and we could hence account for that during runtime and surface problems in a simple way.

I use Valibot instead, but it’s for similar reasons. The most common usages are validating JSON requests and reading JSON files.

> TypeScript already is something, where due to compiler issues I just use “any”.

Uh, maybe you're not seeing the benefit due to this. My codebase bans "any" and Zod is great for runtime data validation.

    TypeScript already is something, where due to compiler issues I just use “any”.

    So Zod is also hard to read and debug.