Real-Time Updates

Concept of the skill

Browser freshness has four primitives: a source of change, a delivery channel, a browser cache or view state, and a freshness contract shown to the user.

Coverage

• Browser freshness decisions for dashboards, feeds, progress panels, notifications, and views that can become stale after initial render.
• Transport selection among adaptive polling, Server-Sent Events, and bidirectional sockets.
• Webhook-to-UI propagation at a pattern level: external change, server state, browser notification, and catch-up fetch.
• Client cache invalidation and refetch orchestration after a live notification.
• Optimistic update safety: when to apply immediately, when to wait, and how to roll back.
• Stale-data communication: timestamps, stale badges, connection status, and non-disruptive refresh prompts.
• Reconnect and missed-update recovery: last seen version, cursor, timestamp, or sequence number.
• Subscription ownership: one shared subscription per resource instead of independent polling loops in every component.

Philosophy of the skill

Stale data without a freshness signal is a false statement. A dashboard that fetched once and never says so teaches the user to trust numbers, statuses, or notifications that may already be outdated.