Agreed. I was skeptical of Deno and I think their package management story was a mistake. But the people were still trying to make JavaScript better and doing so out of genuine love for the language. I especially feel for the employees who put in several years of their life, with the resulting opportunity cost.
I'm not fully convinced that there's a tenable model for open source devtool companies. Usually there's some handwavy plan to do hosting or code quality that never comes to fruition. Hosting is a hard business and the 800 pound gorilla in the room of AWS is even harder to surmount. Otherwise, I'm not sure what business model you can look towards. Support maybe?
People want open source software, but they do not want the compromises that come with funding it. When people try and fail then you get shitty blog posts like this one. It's sheer entitlement. I think the days of building open source tooling and expecting to be able to commercialise it are now completely gone.
Yeah, I mean Deno’s success is predicated on enterprises moving production apps from NodeJS to Deno. Node is extremely established and entrenched, and migrating the goddamn runtime of a large production server is not usually an easy project. If I have a 5-10 year old Node project, it might work well on Deno, but almost no one has the time to champion a migration when it just doesn’t have that many benefits.
Yes, it comes with batteries included, but a big node project already has setups handling things like testing, linting, formatting, and dependencies. Moving to Deno for any of those might actually be easy, but migrations in the JS ecosystem never end up being easy, so people who could sway the company to change tools don’t have the appetite to tell leadership about migration projects with minimal upside and unknown duration. And under a startup with an unknown future.
NodeJS succeeded at undermining existing server toolchains, because web devs were easily sold on writing JS for their servers, so tons of successful startups built with Node, and when Node got pretty well established, it was easier to adopt for greenfield projects in the enterprise.
Deno is Node, but better. So it’s not giving a whole market of devs access to a tool that is way easier to write for. It’s marginally easier to manage and you could maybe drop some other toolchain dependencies. But again, those toolchain things are automated/hidden away from developers directly… like they don’t care we use eslint, they just care CI catches problems before they hit prod and that the linter throws an error early in the process. It’s already easy for them to run locally. So it’s not like Deno lint changes anything about the dev user experience, it just changes what DevOps/platform teams have to manage.
Open core can work, but you really have to find very strong product market fit on the proprietary side--ideally with features that discriminate between users who are relatively happy to pay and users who are not. (There's a reason "SSO tax" is so common.)
And you really have to believe in open source and have the discipline to keep investing in it, otherwise the temptation is ever present to throw more and more effort and resources into the proprietary parts.
"Become integral enough to the toolchain at OpenAI or Anthropic that they buy you" seems like the new one. Normally I dislike startups built with the intention to be acquihired instead of being a sustainable business, but with open source devtools maybe that's not the worst thing. I'm pretty confident that neither bun nor uv will stop existing anytime soon, and the makers got paydays out of it.
I wonder if it's almost like a new version of management consulting. You hire/invest in a bunch of smart 20-somethings who seem generally intelligent with the idea that they'll "disrupt" an industry with their from-first principles approach. Do the 23 year old McKinsey consultants particularly care about their work? No, but the McKinsey name is a fast way to gain clout and access to executives. Ditto the YC name
For what it’s worth Ruby’s JIT took several different implementations, definitely struggled with Rails compatibility and literally used some people’s PhD research. It wasn’t a trivial affair
I really want to host a vibe coding competition and see what can actually be made with these systems. Like if we’re doing insane token spends, it better be in service of creating amazing stuff. Can we make an entirely new programming language? Can we make an OS?
The guy to watch here is https://github.com/Dicklesworthstone . He's rewritten SQLite in Rust with fixes, written his own Rust async engine with fixes that Tokio doesn't have, generated an insane number of tools for agentic orchestration (indexing of all sessions across all harnesses, on-demand skill storage, agent mail), and is currently building out agent orchestration terminal multiplexer stuff.
Source: been watching both these guys closely, as I've been building my own agent factory focused on security + learning: https://github.com/mieubrisse/agenc
Possible, yes. Easier? I tried to search for YouTube videos of people doing amazing things at blazing speed using Gas Town about a month ago, and couldn't find any. I for sure didn't want to spend hours reading and learning something that I don't know if it even works?
Does anyone have like, projects built using it? I couldn't find "look at the output" types of videos or articles or repos, only "look at the input" types of posts about it.
The 15 year old here used gas town to build a Simon game, but for learning Morse code. It's intended for phones. Still needs documentation touched up a bit.
Scroll the game panel up a bit, turn off the mute button and click start game. A Morse code letter will be played, key it back on the iambic keyer. Pad 1 is for dits. Pad 3 is for dahs. (Dots and dashes for those new to Morse code.) Get it right and the game plays that letter and another random letter back out to you. After successfully sending each sequence back to the game, you get a one letter longer sequence. Just like the handheld Simon game. Link's below
Forgot, use wired headphones or speaker. Bluetooth delay wreaks havoc adding delays to Morse code sidetones. Like trying to learn piano with delay between tapping key and hearing tune
That’d also be an interesting data point! What’s the upper limits of vibe coding? Can you vibe code rust? What about an entire programming language toolchain? How about an ecosystem? Can you make a parallel npm?
That would be awesome to see! If there was some prize pool like $5,000 to build an operating system through vibe coding tools only and then people could stream themselves on twitch and you could have "sorts desk" type commentators who are collating all that together. I'd watch that and donate a hundred bucks.
In all honesty, if you scoped this well, one of the big players in the LLM space could definitely host a big marketing event on this spin. Get together a bunch of well known industry folks, have them vibe code a working <thing> in a given time constraint, presentations and prizes, lots of marketing.
I am designing one, aimed at Claude Code and other AI Coding Agents, and getting the first version lex/parser/compiler was an afternoon project. It was initially a TypeScript toolchain generating TypeScript code.
I keep adding things here and there, a couple hours everyday. Then after about a week I decided to switch the toolchain from TypeScript to Rust, how much work? A 5 minute planning session and a ~20 minutes implementation phase.
The fundamental issue is that all of education and childhood accomplishments have become cynical, overly competitive games. Science fairs are now attempts for a child to piggyback off of a lab’s existing work and claim they discovered it. Sports are a vehicle to college admissions. Disability claims become another way to gain an academic advantage. It’s no surprise that the 30 under 30 are filled with scammers and criminals. It’s what we’re teaching students who want to get ahead.
My kids are in things that seem like competition doesn't really need to be a thing and places undue stress on those involved. I'm left wondering, why does everything seem to turn into a a competition with schools (or humans in general)? Why can't folks just do something without needing to compare themselves to others? I'm guessing science fairs (and similar things) didn't start out as a competition, why "poison the well"?
I don’t think this is part of humans because so many of us genuinely chafe against the system. I think it’s because of power and hierarchy and signaling. It’s like when you play board games with a friend and then they turn it into a competition and then it’s not fun anymore. At least with a board game you can walk away. But if it’s your child’s future on the line you will be just as competitive even if you don’t want to be.
So long as there are humans who want to amass power in some way and treat it as a zero sum game, there will be other humans forced to play similarly. Prisoners dilemma.
The answer to "why?" is fairly straightforward, in a way, but hard to see the causality of directly without seeing through all the steps to get there. This is a consequence of two economic factors: globalism and wealth inequality. When there is a strict and unbalanced economic hierarchy, parents will rightfully do anything they can to ensure their children move up the hierarchy or stay on top of the hierarchy. When you are on a hierarchy with everyone in the world instead of just those local to you, the contrasts that must exist to reinforce the hierarchy become larger to remain statistically significant over the larger population. When society had less economic inequality and was more geographically restricted in its entrants, the drive for competition was minimized and other priorities could come to the forefront.
We didn't get here overnight, but economic inequality dominates as a causal factor for nearly any socioeconomic phenomena you can identify in 2026. This is what happens when the top 10% of income earners comprise 50% of consumer spending, and you need to be in the top 15% of income earners to afford permanent housing. If you're a 30% parent (better off than 70% of households), the most important thing you can do for your children is to ensure that they end up in the top 15% or better yet the top 10%. Anything you can do that will help that end, is worth doing, and every moment becomes a competition to set things up as the earlier you do it the bigger the impact in the results.
There's a reason why home prices are correlated to with school district access, why every children's activity becomes a competition, and why in the wealthier (but more rat-racy) parts of the country people spend huge money on private tutoring, education, and training for their children almost from birth.
Many people enjoy competition and find it motivating. This is why sports are so popular, and why many organized activities tend to become competitive. Not everyone enjoys it of course, but the people motivated enough to organize large science fairs are probably highly motivated in general and that tends to corelate with competitiveness.
Not to mention that any large event takes funding. It may not be "for profit" and even if most or all the needed resources are donated there will be people competing for those donations.
Possibly a most archetypal example of Goodhart's law:
"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure"
Parents find kids get ahead by not only good grades but also by winning in science fairs, sports, or disability claims, so they figure out ways to game those systems . . . and, their value as a measure is eliminated.
With few exceptions, these are now only a measure of how well their parents gamed the system.
I think there's more than that. When your parents think the earth is flat it's hard to learn science. George Bush's "No Child Left Behind" we're finally seeing the ramifications across our country. When you can never fail you can never learn.
I don’t think these are mutually exclusive takes. Bun is essentially taking Node and giving it a standard library and standard tooling. But you can still use regular node packages if you want. Whereas Deno def leaned into the clean break for a while
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