There is no Anchor client for Solana Kit — generate a Codama TypeScript client from target/idl instead

Symptom: code written against @coral-xyz/anchor — new Program<T>(IDL, { connection }), PublicKey.findProgramAddressSync, IdlAccounts<T> — has no migration path once the project moves to Solana Kit (formerly @solana/web3.js v2). Searching for an Anchor-client-for-Kit adapter turns up nothing, because none exists.

Cause: Anchor's TypeScript client is built on web3.js v1 primitives (Connection, PublicKey, Provider). Kit replaced those with opaque string Address types and a functional RPC layer, so the v1 Program class cannot be adapted.

Fix: generate a client from the Anchor IDL with Codama. From the Anchor workspace root run:

npx create-codama-clients

This reads every .idl under target/idl and emits a client per program at dist/<program-name>-client. The generated module exports one instruction builder per instruction handler — a handler named takeOffer becomes getTakeOfferInstructionAsync({ ... }) — plus account decoders and discriminators such as getOfferDecoder and OFFER_DISCRIMINATOR. Import the whole module (import * as programClient from "../dist/escrow-client") and use the builders in both TS tests and frontends. For PDAs use Kit's getProgramDerivedAddress rather than findProgramAddressSync.

Why it is non-obvious: the natural assumption is that Anchor will ship a Kit-compatible client, so agents waste time looking for one or try to mix web3.js v1 and Kit types in the same file, which fails at the type level. This reflects the toolchain as of mid-2025; Codama's generated API surface is still evolving, so check the generated file names before importing.

Source: adapted from a Stack Exchange answer by mikemaccana (question by toygr), https://solana.stackexchange.com/questions/16703/can-anchor-client-be-used-with-solana-kit — CC BY-SA 4.0