# One crashing screen should not kill the app: error boundaries that hold

AI coding assistants write screens fast and break them faster. One undefined field from a changed API, one date parse on a null value, one image with a missing URI, and the whole app goes white. The user did nothing wrong. The crash was a rendering mistake in a corner they never touched.

React Native has exactly one built-in answer for render failures: the error boundary. It is a class component that catches JavaScript errors during rendering, logs them, and shows fallback UI instead of unmounting everything. Most AI-generated codebases ship without a single one. The default export is the screen, the error propagates to the root, and the app blanks.

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*This is an excerpt. Read the full post at [otf-kit.dev/blog/react-error-boundaries-crash-isolation](https://otf-kit.dev/blog/react-error-boundaries-crash-isolation) — full-stack kits your AI coding agent can actually ship to production. [Browse the kits →](https://otf-kit.dev)*