Ng-News 25/18: Agentic Angular Apps

Mark Thompson and Devin Chasanoff demonstrated agentic Angular apps, where LLMs process user input and trigger UI changes or function calls—marking a deeper integration between Angular and AI. Meanwhile, the Angular team confirmed that Signal Forms won’t make it into Angular 20.

Agentic Angular Apps

Mark Thompson and Devin Chasanoff did two live streams focused entirely on live coding.

They demonstrated how to integrate LLMs into an Angular application to build what’s called an agentic Angular app.

Agentic apps are applications that still take user input through the UI — as usual — but then use that input to prompt an LLM directly. The response from the LLM is then used to trigger changes in the UI or even call application functions if the model deems it necessary. This leads to a much deeper level of integration between Angular and large language models.

The two livestreams covered different use cases: the first showed a story generator, where users could describe an idea and Angular used the LLM’s output to generate and display visual story cards.

In the second, they built a shopping app where the LLM could automatically filter products and add items to the cart based on the user’s intent.

Q&A Session

According to last week’s Q&A session with Mark Thompson and Jeremy Elbourn from the Angular team, the feature freeze for Angular 20 has happened. Unfortunately, Signal Forms didn’t make it.

So, when your form data source is a Signal, you’ll still need to stick with the good old effect() function to feed the values into the FormGroup.

The session itself was quite intensive. Usually, they do some live coding, but this time it was 90 minutes of straight Q&A. Here are the key takeaways:

👉 Experimental and developer preview features could still be removed. While this is rare in practice, there’s always a slight risk. (Timestamp: 43:35)

👉 Jeremy explained why Angular Material offers fewer components compared to other UI libraries.

Because Google uses a monorepo for all its projects, Angular Material and the apps that use it share the same source code. This makes every change very sensitive—and costly. The more components, the higher the maintenance overhead.

To help with this, the Angular team aims to make it as easy as possible to build your own component library using the Angular CDK. (Timestamp: 55:30)

👉 Mark also hinted at a new documentation section with long-term implications. Curious to see what that turns out to be.

Vitest as experimental feature

In other news: It looks like Vitest is getting closer to official support in Angular. A PR for experimental integration just landed—and it’s already been merged.

Detecting Memory Leaks

Dmytro Mezhenskyi from Decoded Frontend published a video on memory leaks. Using DevTools, he showed how something as simple as an unsubscribed subscription can still hold on to a component instance — something that can easily happen without noticing.