Watchers in Vue provide a way to perform side effects in response to data changes, enabling reactive programming patterns for API calls, validation, and complex state management. As the creator of CoreUI, a widely used open-source UI library, I’ve implemented watchers in numerous Vue components for form validation, search functionality, and real-time data synchronization in enterprise applications. From my expertise, the most effective approach is to use the watch option with proper configuration for deep watching and immediate execution. This method provides precise control over reactive behavior while maintaining clean separation between data and side effects.