I would have written a shorter source, but I did not have the time.

You're right that IDE/dev-time performance might be slower than using generated types since this relies on "dynamic" TypeScript inference rather than static codegen'd types.

That said, depending on how your codegen works and how you're using protos at runtime, this approach might actually be faster at runtime. Types are stripped at compile-time and there’s no generated class or constructor logic — in the compiled output, you're left with plain JS objects which potentially avoids the serialization or class overhead that some proto codegen tools introduce.

(FWIW, type inference in VSCode seemed reasonably fast with the toy examples I was playing with)

I biked with the author from SF to Sacramento — we went up to Marin over GGB, then over the Richmond–San Rafael bridge to the EB

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