Clerk Tanstack Patterns

If you're building a TanStack Start app with Clerk auth, this gives you the four patterns you'll actually need: beforeLoad guards for route protection, createServerFn with auth() calls, passing auth context to loaders, and configuring clerkMiddleware in your Vinxi server setup. The mental model section is helpful because TanStack's server function layer can be confusing if you're coming from Next.js. The pitfalls table catches the common import mixups between client and server packages. It's focused enough that you won't wade through general Clerk docs, but assumes you already know both libraries at a basic level.