Hi everyone! I have about one year of experience with Angular 16 and my company is currently migrating our codebase directly to Angular 21 (v21). We are shifting toward Signals as our primary state management tool.

I am running into a design dilemma regarding how to handle the initial state of complex objects (e.g., user profiles) before an API call finishes, and I want to make sure I'm writing clean, idiomatic Angular.

The Dilemma

If I have a complex interface like IUserData (which has 15-20 fields), I see two main approaches, but both feel messy:

Approach 1: Initialize with mock/empty data

public user = signal<IUserData>({ id: 0, name: '', role: '', email: '', ...15 more fields });

ngOnInit() {
  this.api.getUser().subscribe(data => this.user.set(data));
}

• The issue: If the interface is large, this results in a massive block of boilerplate mock data just to satisfy TypeScript. It feels highly unmaintainable.

Approach 2: Initialize as undefined

public user = signal<IUserData | undefined>(undefined);

• The issue: This forces me to pollute the child templates with the safe navigation operator (user()?.name) everywhere, even though I know the data will strictly be there once the page loads.

My Questions:

1. Coming from regular variables where we could sometimes play loose with initialization, what is the community's best practice for handling large object structures in signals before the API resolves?
2. In TypeScript arrays, we can use the non-null assertion operator (e.g., list.find(...)!) if we are 100% sure the data exists. Is there an elegant equivalent for Signals in the template, or is ?. the only way if we go with the undefined route?
3. Are there architectural patterns (like RxJS interop toSignal) that completely bypass this initialization headache?

Would like to hear how you all handle this in your production apps!

Recently I have updated my visual studio 2026 to latest because of the change in copilot policy

And ever since it's acting sus, from 2 days it crashed 10+ times, and copilot hit tool limitations toooooo fast

I had to use it in vs code later, which didn't read the code better because it's not a solution and got avg results

I was at 18.6.2 I did rollback to 18.6.1, now the crashes reduced but still the copilot issues remain,

Any specific stable version where everything works after copilot policy change?