@wagmi/core

The onboarding experience with @wagmi/core is generally smooth if you're familiar with web3 concepts. The documentation provides clear examples for common tasks like connecting wallets, reading contracts, and sending transactions. The TypeScript support is excellent with well-typed interfaces that catch errors at compile time. However, the migration from v1 to v2+ introduced breaking changes that required careful refactoring, particularly around the config setup and action imports.

Day-to-day usage is pleasant once you understand the pattern of creating a config and passing it to actions. Error messages are descriptive when things go wrong - you'll get clear feedback about missing providers or incorrect chain configurations. The debugging experience is solid with good stack traces, though sometimes the underlying viem errors can be verbose. Community support is strong on GitHub with maintainers actively responding to issues.

Common use cases like wallet connection, contract reads/writes, and transaction tracking are straightforward with well-documented examples. The library abstracts away much of the complexity while still giving you access to lower-level functionality when needed.

Using @wagmi/core in production means dealing with a well-architected but opinionated state management system. The library handles provider connections, account watching, and transaction flows with built-in retry logic that's generally sensible. The connectors pattern works well once you understand it, but initial setup requires careful attention to configuration lifetimes and when to call createConfig versus reusing instances.

Resource management is better than raw ethers/viem usage but you need to monitor connection pooling yourself. The library doesn't expose obvious hooks for connection pool metrics, and under heavy load we've seen stale connections accumulate without clear error signals. Timeout handling is configurable per action which is good, but defaults are aggressive (10s for some operations) and may need tuning for L2s or congested networks.

Error handling has improved significantly in v2+. Errors are typed and distinguish between user rejections, network failures, and contract reverts. The watchAsset and similar APIs provide clear feedback, though logging is minimal—you'll want to wrap critical paths with your own observability. Breaking changes between major versions (v1→v2→v3) were substantial and required significant refactoring each time.

After using @wagmi/core in several production projects, I appreciate its framework-agnostic approach to Ethereum interactions. The TypeScript integration is exceptional—autocomplete for contract methods and type-safe hooks make development much smoother. The v2+ connector system with its new config approach took some adjustment, but it's more maintainable once you understand the paradigm shift from v1.

The documentation has improved significantly, with practical examples for wallet connections, contract interactions, and transaction handling. Error messages are generally helpful, especially for common issues like network mismatches or wallet rejections. The built-in caching and request deduplication work well out of the box.

One gotcha: the learning curve steepens when you need to work with custom connectors or debug state management issues. The abstraction layer, while powerful, can make it harder to understand what's happening under the hood when things go wrong. Stack Overflow coverage is decent but GitHub issues are your best bet for edge cases.