State machines help you manage complex React component logic by modeling UI states explicitly instead of juggling booleans and flags. You define states (loading, success, error), allowed transitions between them, and what actions trigger those transitions. This makes component behavior predictable and eliminates impossible states like "loading and errored" at the same time. Useful for multi-step forms, authentication flows, data fetching with retries, or any UI where you've got nested conditionals getting out of hand. The upfront modeling work pays off when you need to add states or debug why a component got into a weird state. Works well with libraries like XState or you can roll simpler versions yourself.
npx skills add https://github.com/bobmatnyc/claude-mpm-skills --skill react-state-machines