As a founder who built all my prototypes and side projects on Deno for two years, I personally think Deno’s execution was just horrible, and avoidably so. Head-scratchingly, bafflingly bad decision-making.
I was the first engineering hire at Meteor (2012-2016), and we made the mistake of thinking we could reinvent the whole app development ecosystem, and make money at it, so I have the benefit of that experience, but it is not really rocket science or some insight that I wouldn’t expect Ryan Dahl and team to have, in the 2020s.
They were stretched thin with too many projects, which they were always neglecting or rewriting, without a solid business case. They coupled together runtime, framework, linting, docs, hosting, and packaging, with almost all of these components being inferior to the usual tools. The package system became an absolute nightmare.
If the goal was to eventually replace Node and NPM with something where TypeScript was first-class, there was better security, etc, they could have done a classic “embrace and extend.”
So here is what is going to happen:
Deno is going to 100% get acquired.
Ryan Dahl is obviously rare talent and any company that gets Ryan would be incredibly lucky.
He has already done a Google Brain Residency so it makes sense for him to go to OpenAI or another AI lab for developing AI agents.
I know on HN we don’t always love CEOs, and that’s okay… the ethos of startups has changed over the past 10 years, and tech has shifted away from tinkerers and more toward Wall Street. But Ryan Dahl isn’t doing that; he’s a tinkerer and a builder.
I dunno, I just don’t like this vibe of “what have you done for me recently” in this post, especially given he skipped over the company and is calling out Ryan directly for some reason. Ryan is responsible for many of our careers; Node is the first language I really felt at home with.
Comparing him to Nero is gross.
Deno might not succeed as a project, especially with strong competition from Bun as an alternative to Node, but I would say that Deno has been more a force for bettering the ecosystem than not.
Many of those at Deno, including Ryan as well as some of those who have apparently left or been let go have been major contributors to the web development ecosystem. Thank you all for your work — we’re better off for your contributions.
Eventually the reference implementation gets good enough, and that is it.
In JavaScript case, the first error was to ignore compatibility with native addons and existing nodejs modules.
The second was not providing a business value why porting, with the pain of compatibility, one because "it feels better" doesn't release budgets in most companies.
> Despite the initial hype, Rome tools, Deno & Bun will be quasi abandoned as the ecosystem outpaces their release cycle and the benefits don’t merit the headache of migration.
My choice ranking is Deno Deploy > Fly.io > AWS for new projects, depending on complexity and needs. They also have a new Deno sandbox feature which is great for running untrusted code, AI agents, etc.
The real question is can they adapt to customer feedback fast enough, focus priorities, adequately market & grow, make it profitable, etc. Bumpy road but definitely not doomed.
I assume the author is aware that Ryan Dahl created that too?
Not that it would make him immune to criticism, but the author comes off extremely petty.
But I need to have everything in a mono repo for agents to properly work on in.
Cloud functions and weak desperation between dev and prod is a mess, even more so with agents in the loop.
If Dahl had posted the typical layoff announcement people would be criticising that too.
That would be much more sustainable than VC rat fucking the commons to make a buck while suckering in devs that were once good community stewards into dry husks that are only formed to generate profit.
Everything else. Seems everyone and their mother are building "platforms", so they can properly lock you in, look at Vercel for example, to get some inspiration where the rest is probably at least aiming.
Not sure why people keep falling for it though, guess it's easy enough to get started that people don't really want to understand deeper, if you can pay someone $XXX/month to not have to think about it, many people tend to go that route, especially if VC-infested.
However Anthropic owns Bun now, so a different story will unfold.
Why is that? Seems like an agent framework limitation, not a reasonable requirement in general. (I do not have this limitation, but I also have a custom agent stack)
Who cares? Why does the world need so many fringe tools/runtimes? So much fragmentation. Why does every project have to be a long-term success? Put some stuff out if its misery. Don't waste the time of the already few open-source contributors who pour hours into something for no good reason.
I don't use Fresh. Serverless is kind of a weird offering that forces developers to do a lot of work to adjust their programs to running all over the place. I even wish Deno had never supported NPM because that ruined their differentiator.
I'm going to keep using Deno and I hope they use this opportunity to refocus on their core product offering so that I can move back to using it from this VPS that is hosting all of my Deno servers right now.
That is the problem.
Decimation has been commonly used as a synonym for absolute destruction for a long time, being annoyed by it is wasted energy, better to let it go and accept the new meaning.
FWIW, it worked for Bun (at least for the VCs and employees), so there is a model there that works.
LLMs seem likely to kill or at least vastly weaken the support model.
Hundreds of hours? I'm sorry but if you truly needed that much time to find your way around an incredibly straightforward runtime that's on you. Skills for Deno, Node.js, Bun, Cloudflare Workers, browser-based JS and all the rest are like 99% transferable. If Deno doesn't work for you then use something else. It would probably be simpler to switch than writing all these aggressive blog posts.
Seems so. All the breaks from the first system in the name of “we’re doing it right this time” probably killed the momentum.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect
Even the best and brightest of us are still human.
Their initial baffling stance about package.json was the first bad sign. I almost can't imagine the hubris of expecting devs to abandon such a large eco-system of packages by not striving for 100% support out of the gate. Of course they had to relent, but honestly the damage was done. They chose ideology over practicality and that doesn't bode well with devs.
I think they saw Rust and thought that devs were willing to abandon C++ for a language that was more modern and secure. By touting these same benefits perhaps they were hoping for similar sentiment from the JavaScript community.
Deno has some really good ideas (e.g. the library KV interface). I agree with a lot (but not all) of Dahl's vision. But the whole thing is just a bit too quirky for me to invest anything critical into an ecosystem that is one funding round away from disappearing completely.
Pray you never have a “good enough” competitor.
I felt it should have aimed to be a 100% drop in replacement for nodejs then innovated on top of that.
I agree with all the comments saying this is unnecessarily critical. We're getting an amazing tool totally for free. Quit complaining.
I would not be surprised if they get bought by one of the big AI players anyway, given the weird purchases of Bun and Astral.
hmm, blog author doesn't know about Anthropic's Bun acquisition, and consequently shouldn't comment on "the entire AI industry"
I never heard of Deno until today. So perhaps this was a marketing failure.
Also not everyone gets it right, only because they got lucky once, history is full of one hit wonders.
Thus platforms and SaaS products, seem to be the only way to make sustainable open source products.
This house of cards is about to collapse and lot of "smart" devs are going to act shocked when the water recedes.
The same thing always happens: companies "adopt" open source then, unless you have monopoly, money problems eventually appear and leadership sees this lovely team with "bloated budget" in the bylines.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/commentary/breakingviews/anthropic-g...
On my own machine I have a dev/ folder full of checkouts of other repos, and I'll often run Claude Code or Codex CLI in that top level folder and tell it to make changes to multiple projects at once. That works just fine.
In a poly repo setup, agents are less effective having to infer changes across repo boundaries using specs rather than code as context. Changes that impact multiple repos are also much messier to wrangle.
Zig is yet to be 1.0, and who knows what anthropic will make out of it.
They can even pivot yet again back into node, as most acquisitions go.
For the rest, I can't comment on, all the best.
Since then, I know that it's there and that it's more secure than Node in some applications, and I can see using it being a good option. But it sounds like it might be too little too late? Going by this article, at least.
How do you minimally build based on the changeset? How do you know this is sufficient for correctness? What happens when feature branches get out of date and don't see the upstream change that breaks the local branch? How do you version subprojects, as they change or as a whole?
Monorepos have a habit of creating hidden dependencies. The languages you use can help or hurt here.
In my opinion, FOSS and VC have opposite goals and attitudes: openness, organic growth, staying free vs moat, meteoric growth fueled by marketing, turning a huge profit. I don't see how they could be compatible in the long term, unless the FOSS project is a gateway drug into a proprietary ecosystem.
At that point I was left wondering -- if Bun and Deno have essentially the same strategy/approach, why would I pick the less mature option?
And so I ported everything to Bun
I can't speak generally because it varies but is this really the case here? Other posters have commented on missing features and issues with their product i.e. Deno Deploy so is it not willing to pay or not worth it?
Grants are a very effective model of support, it seems to work for entire industries + professions around the world. Even better when there is a body of professionals working democratically to decide which people should be awarded the grants.
Just because you have a failure of imagination doesn't mean others do.
Content marketed at wannabe startup founders tends to be encouraging and panglossian. It's good to see here what you're signing up for if you succeed with some degree of traction.
- Deno initially seemed like something a number of us were clamouring for: a restart of the server JS ecosystem. ES modules from the start, more sensibly thought out and browser compatible APIs, etc etc
- that restart is incompatible with the business goals of a VC funded startup. They needed NPM compatibility but that destroyed the chances of a restart happening.
I’m just sticking with Node. I know Deno and Bun are faster and have a few good features (though Node has been cribbing from them extensively as time has gone on). I just don’t trust a VC backed runtime to keep velocity in the long term.
The world doesn't need a dozen JS engines.
The world doesn't need many dozens of Linux distros.
The world doesn't need a handful of BSD distros.
The world doesn't need many dozens of package managers.
The world doesn't need hundreds of JS frameworks.
The world doesn't need dozens of programming languages or chat protocols or CI/CD systems.
The world doesn't need dozens of init systems, service managers, display servers, audio stacks, universal app formats, build tools/bundlers.
Deno may have dragged the JS runtime space forward, fully agree. Maybe it served its purpose and it is time to say goodbye.
I am selling it btw! Look at the CRT-screenshots. :-) https://www.kleinanzeigen.de/s-anzeige/sgi-indigo-2-mit-nets...
Feel bad for them, they obviously just didn't capture a real userbase. I expect if yt-dlp hadn't started to require it they'd have just silently flamed out.
I wonder if the layoffs have a deeper connection to yt-dlp.
Why was this a problem with Deno? Up until recently you had to use package.json and npm/pnpm for it to work, but even then it was better than Bun or Node since you could use import map to avoid compiling packages for testing etc (Node and Bun's type stripping doesn't work across local monorepo dependencies, and tsx produces mangled source maps making debugging a hassle). Now Deno has built-in workspace/monorepo support in deno.json.
Bun to Deno is what Zig i to Rust: a much simpler, much easier way to overcome its common predecessor's shortcomings. Not nearly as thoroughly and revolutionarily, but still.
Accountability starts and stops at the top. Many CEOs (CxOs) get called out. Personally, I want to write something similar about Bluesky leadership, who have fumbled hard multiple times since peaking, and have now "raised funding" from Bain Capital (private equity).
Friday 20 Mar 2026
I visited deno.com yesterday. I wanted to know if the hundreds of hours I’d spent mastering Deno was a sunk cost. Do I continue building for the runtime, or go back to Node?

deno.com 404 not found error page stating: Sorry, there was an issue loading this page
Well I guess that pretty much sums up why a good chunk of Deno employees left the company over the last week.
Layoffs are what American corpo culture calls firing half the staff. Totally normal practice for a sustainable business. Mass layoffs are deemed better for the moral of those who remain than a weekly culling before Friday beers.
The Romans loved a good decimation.† If I were a purveyor of slop and tortured metaphors, I’d have adorned this post with a deepfake of Ryan Dahl fiddling as Deno burned. But I’m not, so the solemn screenshot will suffice.
† I read Rome, Inc. recently. Not a great book, I’m just explaining the reference.
A year ago I wrote about Deno’s decline. The facts, undeterred by my subjective scorn, painted a harsh picture; Deno Land Inc. was failing.
Deno incorporated with $4.9M of seed capital five years ago. They raised a further $21M series A a year later. Napkin math suggests a five year runway for an unprofitable company (I have no idea, I just made that up.)
Coincidentally, after my blog post topped Hacker News — always a pleasure for my inbox — Ryan Dahl (Deno CEO) clapped back on the offical Deno blog:
There’s been some criticism lately about Deno - about Deploy, KV, Fresh, and our momentum in general. You may have seen some of the criticism online; it’s made the rounds in the usual places, and attracted a fair amount of attention.
Some of that criticism is valid. In fact, I think it’s fair to say we’ve had a hand in causing some amount of fear and uncertainty by being too quiet about what we’re working on, and the future direction of our company and products. That’s on us.
Reports of Deno’s Demise Have Been Greatly Exaggerated - Ryan Dahl
Dahl mentioned that adoption had doubled following Deno 2.0.
Since the release of Deno 2 last October - barely over six months ago! - Deno adoption has more than doubled according to our monthly active user metrics.
User base doubling sounds like a flex for a lemonade stand unless you give numbers. I imagine Sequoia Capital expected faster growth regardless. The harsh truth is that Deno’s offerings have failed to capture developers’ attention. I can’t pretend to know why — I was a fanboy myself — but far too few devs care about Deno. On the rare occasions Deno gets attention on the orange site, the comments page reads like in memoriam.
I don’t even think the problem was that Deno Deploy, the main source of revenue, sucked. Deploy was plagued by highly inconsistent isolate start times. Solicited feedback was ignored. Few cared. It took an issue from Wes Bos, one of the most followed devs in the game, for anyone at Deno to wake up. Was Deploy simply a ghost town?
Deno rushed the Deploy relaunched for the end of 2025 and it became “generally available” last month. Anyone using it? Anyone care? The Deno layoffs this week suggest only a miracle would have saved jobs. The writing was on the wall.
Speaking of ghost towns, the JSR YouTube channel is so lonely I feel bad for linking it. I only do because it shows just how little interest some Deno-led projects mustered.

GitHub star history chart comparing NPMX to JSR
JSR floundered partly because Deno was unwilling couldn’t afford to invest in better infrastructure. But like everything else in the Deno ecosystem, users just weren’t interested. What makes a comparable project like NPMX flourish so quickly? Evidently, developers don’t want to replace Node and NPM. They just want what they already have but better; a drop-in improvement without friction.
To Deno and Dahl’s credit, they recognised this with the U-turn on HTTP imports. But the resulting packaging mess made things worse. JSR should have been NPMX. Deno should have gone all-in on package.json but instead we got mixed messaging and confused docs.
I could continue but it would just be cruel to dissect further. I’ve been heavily critical of Deno in the past but I really wanted it to succeed. There were genuinely good people working at Deno who lost their job and that sucks. I hope the Deno runtime survives. It’s a breath of fresh air. B*n has far more bugs and compatibility issues than anyone will admit. Node still has too much friction around TypeScript and ECMAScript modules.
So where does Deno go from here? Over to you, Ryan.
Where is Deno CEO, Ryan Dahl?
Tradition dictates an official PR statement following layoffs. Seems weird not to have one prepared in advance. That said, today is Friday, the day to bury bad news. I may be publishing this mere hours before we hear what happens next…
Given Dahl’s recent tweets and blog post, a pivot to AI might be Deno’s gamble. By the way, it’s rather telling that all the ex-employees posted their departures on Bluesky. What that tells you depends on whether you enjoy your social media alongside Grok undressing women upon request. I digress. Idle speculation has led to baseless rumours of an OpenAI acquisition. I’m not convinced that makes sense but neither does the entire AI industry.
I’m not trying to hate on Dahl but c’mon bro you’re the CEO. What’s next for Deno? Give me users anyone a reason to care. Although if you’re planning a 10× resurgence with automated Mac Minis, I regret asking.
So did the people who built Deno
Whose fault is that?
Isn’t the “exceeding $5BN” comment a lifetime revenue? … on $30BN spent (or something ridiculous.)
A lot of the commentary on the frontier model companies is based on how much money they’ve spent to the relatively small amount they’ve made in return, and the skepticism, especially given almost continuous reporting, that deploying AI in a variety of situations doesn’t seem to yield favorable business outcomes. OpenAI shifting to enterprise / coding type stuff this week seems, also, potentially informative. Is Gen AI actually useful for anything but code? Signs keep pointing to no… and even then, we’re in the early stages of figuring out how to build without destroying everything… something Amazon just recognized as possible with their recent shopping outage.
(I was going to try claude again this weekend, but when I tried to login, got an error and am reminded how much down time I experience from Anthropic, arg...)
i will begin to care about a CEOs feelings when they put the wellbeing of their employees before their own. not saying that the Deno CEO has done anything on the order of the raw aggression we see from other CEOs in our industry but, as they say, if you cant take the heat stay out of the kitchen.
But once you add that NPM compatibility layer the incentives shift, it just isn’t worth anyone’s while to create new, modern modules when the old ones work well enough.
It all feels similar to the Python 2 vs 3 dilemma. They went the other way and hey, it was a years long quagmire. But the ecosystem came out of it in a much better place in the end.
What if we reframe this about how the CEO treats their users and employees? Why does Ryan deserve to be free from criticism?
In other words, do Anthropic tools provide any affordances for this or is it something I have to manage externally?
That product only works against one GitHub repo at a time. The Claude Code you install and run locally doesn't have a GitHub attachment at all and can run against whatever you checkout yourself.
Here's an open feature request about it: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/23627
I don't see any such claim in the post. The criticism is about Ryan the CEO, not Ryan the person.
Besides the title, from the end of the post:
> I’m not trying to hate on Dahl but c’mon bro you’re the CEO. What’s next for Deno? Give ~me~ ~users~ anyone a reason to care.
Perhaps you know Ryan and read too much into the criticism?
I'm trying to understand why you carve an exception for this one individual.
When I worked in restaurants, the owner and I had a very interesting conversation after hours, and with beers, about his thoughts and feelings being responsible for the well being and livelihood of everyone that worked there. It was a positive moment, I thought I had a great boss, I work my ass off for him.
A year later I found he was trimming hours off of my paycheck. I quit on the spot. Months later I heard he did the same to the waitstaff tips and it wasn't much longer before it all fell apart.
People can appear very different publicly than privately, and they can change over time.
I'm not saying anything groundbreaking here. Humanity is complex and varied.