The State of Javascript 2026

The state ofjs survey just dropped in February of 2026 and there's some interesting stuff about libraries and tools and all of the things that we're using every single day in our code. And today we're going to be breaking down what's interesting about the state of JS 2025. My name is Scott. I'm a developer from Denver. With me as always is West Boss. What's up, Wes? man there. I love doing these because it's such a good read on like where devs are at, you know, what tools are they using, what frameworks are they using, what's popping, because it's it's it's one thing to like listen to like the hype circles of web development that uh you and I perpetuate, but it's another thing to actually like look at the raw data of like like what are people actually using and what are people enjoying? What are people not like using? what what has popped in the last year or so of and there's so much good stuff here. So, I'm excited to get in. Yeah, me too. Where do you want to kick this off? Do we want to start on the libraries? There's the the whole section on here for JavaScript features. Uh, as you mentioned when we were talking about this pre-show, it's gotten kind of less interesting. Like, okay, we're still talking about nullish coallesing. like, okay, we've been talking about that for years. It's been in a lot it's been in JavaScript forever, you know. So, JavaScript had like I don't know probably six or seven years of like major API improvements and and the actual like the language itself is starting to get pretty good and and like we certainly have had lots lots of new things, you know, lots of new methods added to it. There's all these like immutable methods added to arrays, but simply just like looking at the stats of these features, it seems like people are not as as like dialed in on them as I I think people are a bit more distracted by all the AI stuff going on right now. But that said, the the libraries, the tooling, the bundlers, um resources, all of those things that people are using, those have quite a bit uh they're not as stagnant as as the actual language features. And I think there's a lot more interesting stuff in that. So we're going to start into just go straight into the library stuff and then we'll get into all the build and bundling tools. Yeah. And and so this is the change in the change in popularity over time where there's a graph here uh for people who are listening on audio we will describe everything but it's either way it's whether you have used it or have not used it whether you have negative opinions or positive opinions on it. Right? And the most interesting thing about this chart is that so many of these libraries share this same backwards C shape. It looks like it it's a backwards C where they start and you know people less people have used them more people have used them so it goes up a little bit and people like it and then over time more people have used it or just over time people hate it more and more and more so it goes further and further to the left forming this backward C and if you look just about everything kind of follows that same shape whether that's express uh react and some of them to a much different degree like Webpack is crazy. Webpack is like way far to the uh negative opinions and have used territory. But what I think is interesting is the ones that don't follow this same shape u particularly down here solid. Now solid is still pretty low in terms of the have used but solids makes like kind of like an S whereas people are using it and I think the sentiment I've reached is that people are coming back to it and generally like we we had that episode about spelt recently and one of the comments was like so it's getting close to being like solid it's like trying to catch up to solid now and I think solid does have a general sentiment of being a solid choice right like a a Yeah. And I I I I don't mean to be a dad joke about that, but I do think that it is an interesting use case for where like I think people are seeing that it is definitely a good choice and solve some of their React issues without being a completely different beast like something like you can move to it pretty quickly. Um, I feel like the people that use solid are generally a little bit a little bit more advanced um and care about the the nitty-gritty, you know, right? Most people will just kind of like default to writing React. Um, and then once you you either get really good at React or you you kind of look for something else and that's kind of where you start dipping into Vue and spelt and whatnot. But like I feel like the the folks that pick up Solid are are pretty dialed in on this type of thing and and they get it. Yeah. Other ones that share a similar kind of S shape but more higher use territories. Vest for one. I think Vest is still on the way up. People are realizing it's so fast and wonderful. And if you're using Vit Vest just makes sense. Playright is one of these things that I think people were paying attention to and then maybe oversw people are back to using and enjoying playright because it's doing a lot of nice automation for them. Another one I noticed in here is VIT in general has a much larger version of this massive S shape. So what's so interesting about this is that this does typically follow a number of standard shapes. It's like the backwards C where something gets popular and then everybody hates it. Uh but then what I don't understand is why so many of them have the same S shape where they're they're really uh have positive opinions slightly negative the previous year and then positive the the year before that and then like the long tale of what would be the boomerang. It's almost like the boomerang is starting to happen and then it corrected itself back to an S. this like backwards C is happening and it pulls it back. But VIT, oh my gosh, VIT is the most popular, most used tool on the planet. And I don't feel like that should be any surprise, folks. That is my personal experience, that's the way it goes. The one interesting one that popped out to me here is the angular what it does is it it kind of had like a it this survey has been around so long that they're they're almost at 10 years now, right? 2016 the data goes back uh and it started at I haven't used but not a lot of people had used it but they're very positive about it and then it kind of slowly moved towards being more used and negative opinions but then 2023 got positive again you know swiped right back and then then 2024 got more positive and then 2025 got less I I don't know what to make I'd be curious about this angular chart if it went all the way back to 2013 where you could see like the true Angular boom because people who started after like postreact don't really understand that like everything everyone was picking up was either Angular or Backbone but it was like almost angular like I I remember so many jobs that was like the big thing and then there's something like Mocha Mocha here which is just like gone consistent it's like a straight line to the left from positive to negative doesn't even get higher or lower it's just gets uh worse reviews over time. So, I thought this was interesting specifically just because of the the patterns you see in the shapes of things that they do form this backwards C-shape and then some of them form an S shape. And the only ones that really buck that trend, it's like the angular and Gatsby's kind of crazy, but very interesting stuff. Really quickly, the library tier list, if you scroll down to that, they have the S, A, B, and C tier. And I don't know if there's a whole lot surprising me here, right? Like V Hano, Playright, Astro, Bun in the S tier. I'm surprised about Astro being an S tier. Not because Astro is bad, but because I often hear people say, I tried to use Astro and maybe it like didn't fit my use case. But in my experience, I really like Astro. So, but I am surprised that general sentiment is that it's so high. I think it's the people that use Astro absolutely love it. Um, and then I just think not enough people are using Astro for for the rest of the stuff because if you're looking at what all of your possible options are out there, especially now that a lot of the frameworks have have this whole idea of like islands and whatnot. So, I think tier list tier list that's interesting here is that NextJS is in the C tier, which is the lowest tier. Um, that's where I would personally uh put it, but like I'm also a hater. So, like I'm surprised to see this is so low when you look at like what it's next to. It's next to Gatsby. Like who's using Gatsby still? Uh, Selenium. Who's using Selenium? Uh, Webpack, like uh Mocha, Cyprus. I I'm surprised Cypress is that low. It is kind of like a unique thing, but I I guess most people have like jumped to playright as being the thing. Yeah. Well, if you just think about like if you look at this list and you ask people like what was the most painful part of your career and it they're probably are going to go back to like flaky mocha tests, these annoying Cypress tests, you know, like oh Angular one, Angular's in the C tier as well, you know, Webpack configs just constantly like breaking and not working. Gatsby. Gatsby has a crazy like fall from grace story. And I think it's just as people's sites got too big. That's what happened to mine, right? It just came from this a beautiful uh static site build to like a a huge pain to actually deploy. But Nex as well is just is such a divisive framework and and also I think a lot of people who don't like React are like they just like point at Nex.js and say React bad, you know, like Scott here. React has 72% in the favorability score where NexJS has 55%. So it's not just React bad. Also I I would put myself in in that category as well. So I sense I I actually wrote my own bespoke React framework instead of picking up Next just because I found it to perform better using React Router and all kinds of stuff. So I had to deal with custom doing hydration stuff. That was a lot of fun. I picked that. I was like, "Oh, I'd rather uh hit myself in the foot with a hammer instead of uh picking this other tool up." All right, next one we have here is ratios over time. The prize for the largest relative usage increase goes to Vest and Playright. So that means like so many people are moving their testing setups over um away from what was the one before playright? Why am I even forgetting this? Cyber. No, Playright is was a fork of um Puppeteer. That's what it was. Oh, Puppeteer. Yes. Yeah. And then in V test was like it's like Mocha compatible, right? Um but the biggest increases that we have here if you look at the largest increases and the largest decreases is obviously V went up what 6%. Um ES build a a 6% increase as well. Vest huge increase. Playright big increase. Nest.js JS coming in this one. I I don't know anybody that uses Nest.js and and probably all the comments are going to get mad at me. Not to say that they they don't people don't use it, but that's a I think it's an Angular thing. I think uh Angular folks use uh Oh, you're right. Yeah, you're right. Nest.js is very popular Angular community. That's that's also the thing is that sometimes you just aren't in the the same circles as these types of thing. And that's why I love the survey. you realize, oh wow, that's a lot more popular. Oh yeah, I'm in a bubble for sure. And this is in usage, mind you, because this is just largest increase or decrease in usage. If we look at like awareness or interest, these things like really change substantially. So as far as usage goes, the largest decrease in these it's it's mostly just ones that haven't increased. It's like there's not like a huge downturn in nothing has like tanked here. So I don't think there's anything all that interesting there. Yeah, positivity I think is an interesting one. Uh especially if we looked at that that previous chart where it shows over time there's that that C-shaped curve. You kind of see that exact same shape in some of these where it's like instead of being it looks more like a rainbow where you know over time the these things just get less and less uh popular or uh less and less positive sentiment there. One thing I think is interesting here is always diving into the other front-end frameworks because you know there's the big boys, there's the uh the ones that everybody knows about. Interestingly enough, this 163 people put Astro and other front-end frameworks. I don't think that really counts to me. That's like more of a meta framework. But we do have 49 uh respondents uh who voted for Ember here. Though the one I think is the most interesting on this list is Ripple. Ripple being a new one that is not quite really out yet. You can use this thing and I've been kind of keeping up with this. Uh oh. I thought Ripple was, you know what Ripple was and I've been ignoring it all this time. Ripple was like a Blackberry tool to test like Blackberry apps locally. That's why I've been ignoring it all time. This is ripple-ts.com. That what what is this? a TypeScript UI framework. Yeah, Ripple is it's inspired by it's it's it's an entirely unique thing. It is inspired by spelt solid and react. They have an interesting syntax. You'll you'll recognize some of this as being like it does feel like spelt mixed with react. If somebody was like let me take some of the stuff like the way that state is being done uh it's not being done through you know runes but there is a track function and that's you're saying all right we're tracking this value and then there's derived values there's like some symbols because this is a compiled language but then in terms of like how you're authoring components you're export exporting a component function kind of uh so it functions it's like a it's its own syntax and and so therefore it solves some of the issues of spelt like defining multiple components per file uh and using them like functions and then it also solves some of the things of react like it has by default uh scope styling. It's interesting syntax. It's an interesting language. It's still very fresh, but I'm in their discord. I've been uh checking this out. I haven't gotten to use it just yet, but it does feel like there's a number of things that are nice about it. So coming in on the chart for probably the very first time with 34 respondents and I think the the people behind it are are bright. So uh interesting to see that show up. Um next one is meta framework ratios over time. So this one is pretty clear that Nex.js is is still top dog here. In fact their usage percentage went up 4% but if you look at their interest or satisfaction they all went down which is is kind of interesting. Maybe that's a lot of people just vibe coding stuff and it uses Nex.js by default. So if we look at usage, Astro's usage has shot up uh from 2021 started at number seven has gotten all the way up to number two. Number two, number two, you remember Austin Powers Astro number two. And then if you look at awareness, Astro is still pretty low. So for usage being at number two and uh awareness is number four, people are like as they're becoming aware of Astro are really liking it. Interest is number one. Satisfaction for Astro is number one. Knocking off Top Dog SpeltKit. My My boy. Look at how they massacred my boy here. Astro has taken down Spelkit. Spelkit's now number two. And then appreciation. This is interesting. I I don't what is appreciation is the gap between interest and satisfaction. So Astro's appreciation has gone down which is interesting. Uh it's down to number nine. So people aren't appreciating Astro the gap between interest. So positive sentiment among people who have heard of it and satisfaction positive sentiment amongst people who've used it. Interesting. And then uh positivity Astro number one uh all the way down from number four in 2021 up to number one. What's really interesting to me here is that Tanstack start is not on this list at all. Now granted, they they took this survey probably as Tanstack start was just in in beta. Um but if you scroll down to other meta frameworks like what else are people using? uh 50% of the people that wrote something in were were using Tanstack start which is what 235 respondents and that's that's quite a bit out of I think 11,000 people took took it. So Tanstack start popping absolutely popping and then right below that is is TANSAC router as well like a lot of people are simply just the core of Tanstack start is it's it's a router right so that most people are simply just using the Tanstack router as their own framework can I give a shout out to my 13 respondents who put in Meteor here shout out to those folks uh there's also V I AE E never heard Vik Vik I'm pretty sure we had this conversation last year when we did this this episode uh composable framework to build advanced applications with blazing fast quick start next generation your stat your choice they nailed all the words uh blazing flast next generation DX unprecedented flexibility um and it looks like you you bring your own stuff you you can choose your front-end framework work or your uh backend framework it looks like or your transport next alternative ve getting in there. What else? Expo 11D 11D 4% lower. I think the we've said this for a couple years now but the the static site like the entire website being a static site generator seems to have have like fully gone away. Okay. And then that's not to say that like your your site should not have static pages. I I I cache most of my stuff and or pre-render it out as static pages, but just like buying into something where the entire thing is static and then you realize I just need a little bit of something that's not static. You know, I needed to be a little bit more flexible. And then you realize, ah, I probably shouldn't have done this whole thing as static. I just need a little bit of dynamicness. A little bit of dynamicism. Yes, dynamicism. Yes, a little bit of that. Let's talk I I just want to hit real quick the metap framework painoint and the highest pain point for people is excessive complexity which like yeah excessive complexity you know the things that we're doing I think there's too many times where we're having to do the same exact thing over and over again. things feel boilerplatey when like man I I I think that simplicity is a a thing we'll continue to see with with new frameworks either frameworks doing more for you or because what like right now these meta frameworks they you still need to bring so much stuff to have them be like fully usable and then you have to wire that up together and it all feels like complex so using together yeah we'll see something there I I think a lot of the complaints over excessive complexity have to do with individual component like caching and and updating individual things because like in my opinion one of the best things about React server components in in Nex.js is the ability to fetch data in the component be able to use React suspense. Um, now you can use the same thing in in spelt land as well, a synchronous spelt. I think that those are fantastic because if you have one thing on your site where it might take a little bit longer or you want to like not cache the entire page, um, but you want to just cache like one piece of it for, for example, like I have a footer on my website where the the the data in the footer is live. Um, and I want that to continually be updated maybe every so often, but like the blog post itself doesn't need to be rerendered every single time. And there's there's other parts, right? It doesn't make sense to cache at a page level. and the all of the stuff around React suspense and caching and being able to stream from the server to the client, that stuff is both fantastic, but also really hard to wrap your head around and and figure out how to do it right. So, I bet a lot of that complexity is I bet a lot of that 14% is is those people. Yeah. Yeah. Very interesting stuff in here. Do people have pain points? Yeah, for sure. Okay, so let's look at you wanted to look at back-end frameworks next. Back-end frameworks are interesting because well a lot of us are using full stack or meta frameworks now. So the folks who are running just straight up backend frameworks. It it does seem like well not that it does seem like it seems like by this chart express is still the top dog by far like 80% Nest 32%. Yeah, Express is such a weird one where and like I have I had this myself as well where it like it's just not worth you have such a huge app. Not necessarily worth but it's such a big job to move off of the like connect handlers and especially when you have your your O and everything just wound into the that as middleares. such a big job to move that into the next generation which is like like web request web response which everything else uses now right um thankfully I I just moved mine off of express and it's it's it's not like oh that's so much better you know that's the other thing as well it's like oh it's that's nice that it's all in like a standard web web request web response um and I think that's why express is just so big you know like there's it's not worth people's time to to move off of But I do have I have noticed personally um some AI defaulting to express for things and it like drives me nuts. I I was doing something and then I see it's like setting up an Express endpoint and we're I'm I'm in the middle of a spelt kit site. I have my agents tuned. It knows that it's a spelkit site and I'm like why the f are you doing an express route? It's like, well, we needed a route for the web the the the API. It's like, brother, you have the whole API system baked into the app. Like, why why are you setting up a separate express server? I would never ask you to do that. Hano showing up for the first time in 15%. I would love to see next year Hano shooting up and express shooting down. Personally, that's what I like to see. I yeah I so I linked up this express hano and you can kind of see every single npm package right now is seeing like double numbers um going up right now. Everything is just increasing an insane amount and that's simply just because there's a lot more people coding right now and there's a lot more agents just spinning stuff up and and people are just making projects left and right. So like the the fact that both numbers are going up I think is is kind of a moot point because but you can see that I don't know Honel's Hon is biting the heels of that and also Hano is used in a lot of of the meta frameworks even if you don't know that you're using Hano um it's often it's either Nitro or Hano those are the two like little web servers that are sitting behind a lot of these frameworks that are being built. Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting. Um, yeah, it there there is that weird thing now we're experiencing where it's like whatever AI is suggesting is just getting shoehorned into apps. Um, did you see the amplifying? They had this um Yeah, I did. They had this like stats on what cloud code picks. So, what they did is they took a whole bunch of different code examples, right? They had like a a React Spa, they had an backend app, they had I think they had a Python app, and they had an Nex.js app. And then they asked it several questions of like um what should I use for styling, what should I use for components, where should I host this, what should I use for um error monitoring, and they tracked what Cloud Code gave them um from the different models. And it's it's significantly different between the latest Opus update and and the ones that were um what Sonnet 4.5 versus Opus 4.5 like Express just wiped off the map really. Um in the latest one um Prisma to Drizzle was nuts. Like it was recommending Prisma. Let's see if you scroll down to where it says where models disagree. Hold on one second. Sorry for the interruption folks. cuz I had a salad delivery. Oo, homemade naan bread. I got some I got all kinds of stuff in here. My wife is the best. Shout out to Courtney. Yeah. So, look at this. They asked like, "What OM should I be using?" Sonnet 45 was Prisma 79% of the time. Opus 45 was Drizzle 60% of the time. And then Opus 46 Drizzle 100% of the time. So like it's clear that they are training these things. E either they're taking the like the feedback as to like when they suggested something and then they they train the model on it being like oh people didn't want this or they're simply just like I often wonder if they're just writing these things in. I know straight into it cuz they certainly did that for getting rid of the purple. You know in these models they had to beat the purple out of out of these models and it's the purple is almost entirely gone. It's been replaced with like model space fonts and and putting circles around or border borders around everything. But that was unreal that this is like there's like a claw code stack now where it just chooses all of the the entire stack for you. This is fascinating. We'll link this up so people can check this thing out. Uh like authentication custom DIY like where's Better Off on this because I always do I I use Better O for everything. I I do wonder. Yeah, how much of this is just from the training verse? Like how are they steering this if at all? Uh really fascinating stuff. But I got to say, shout out to uh Sentry number one in observability. It's picked the most amount of times and I got to say for good reason cuz it's excellent. So check it out. centry.io/sintax. Sign up to use the uh coupon code tasty treat all lowercase all one get two months for free. I got to say, man, Wes, uh, speaking of observability, I've been observing my agents. So, I put in Sentry has AI monitoring and I've rigged up my agents here. And so, like, let me show you my my open code. I wrote an open code extension to track my agent usage in Sentry. And so, it like tells you which session specifically it is working with. It tells you the models. It talks about tool calls. It shows you your tool calls, the average speed and time of the different models. You can filter everything by all this, your requests of different types. You can get the errors coming in from the LLMs and everything in here too. So, if you're doing any kind of agent work, whether that is in within your app or in your process, you can actually use Century's AI monitoring to do that for you. It absolutely rips. So cool. Yeah. I'm currently um working on What's your most common tool call? Uh my most common tool call let's see in the p we'll do in uh the last 90 days my most common tool call is read read and uh bash. Can you does it does it break out bash any any further than that? Oh it does. Yes, man. I need to get more into this data cuz there's so much data in here. Uh like yeah, spelt autofixer called 248 times. Uh task skill, web fetch, edit. Yeah, it's it's interesting stuff. And again, I'm I'm just really, you can see, only like a week or two into getting this data. And then now I'm wiring up Pi because man, I'm building a whole dank PI orchestration setup, Wes. Like, of course. And I got to have some observability into that. What's it doing? Yeah, that's good. Yeah. Also, if like you know where your your money's going, right? If if your uh tokens are being wasted on specific tool calls, you might not necessarily know, oh man, I spent 300 bucks on like the React docs being sent with every call. Exactly. I think that's the thing I'm most excited about with this is like really having a handle on uh optimizing process. Uh you know me. All right, back to JS. Let's talk about testing frameworks and and kind of what's being used right now. So if we go down to we go to testing tools over time and then filter for the rank just to see what's being popped up. Just again still number one. these tools that are so big. Sometimes you think, oh, everybody's using VEST or whatever, but these big tools take a long time to to dethrone, but VEST coming in at number three. Um, Storybook still coming in at number two as well, which is impressive. And Playright coming up. So, that the whole story of the STAJS is VEST and Playright are just absolutely climbing. Everybody's using that lately. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. Those are some big climbs for Playright. Big climbs for Vest. I think Vest is still going to keep climbing because you still have a lot of folks who aren't even on Vit, which like I'm sorry cuz it's it's just so wonderful. Yeah, I I I find this to be really interesting. Bun test showing up in here as well. Um yeah, really interesting stuff. I don't even think you you don't even need to be on Vit to to make V test work. Is that true? Yeah, because like like most people have like some expect or like mocha like you have some sort of um unit tests and you in many cases you can simply just swap these things over, right? You're using justest or whatever, you can just swap over the packages um and they will simply just work. Um, I think a lot of the pain people have with with justest and whatever is that it still needs commonjs and you're compiling your code so that it will run and now you're testing it against like this weird compiled stage which is not the code that's running in production and that's a bit of a pain. So seeing people move to vest which is it's testing it as as your code is running um sorry not as it's running but it's it's testing it as if it were bundled for production. Um, and then also playright whereas you're literally just testing it in the browser, your integration testing. I think people's tests are getting in a much better shape. And honestly, I feel that as well that between those two tools and using AI to help you write tests, I feel like the pain of testing is like a thousand times less. Yeah. Uh and if we look at the pain points, number one being bonking, but performance being number three, which I think those folks who who have listed performance could uh give Vest a try. So other tools here, these are just general libraries. We have Zod up top here. A shocking amount of people still listing uh Low Dash, bro. 4,000 people. Low dash. Low dash. I'm surprised underscore isn't on here if the load out is this high still. Hold on. If we uh It is. It's number 12. Still 7% of people uh using underscore. And I I wonder if this is just like Yeah, I've I've heard of that. I used that at one point. And then I'm going to put a check on there. But like what's more interesting is is which ones have gone up or down, right? Like Zod, massive 12% spike in the last in the last year. Um, everybody is realizing, man, I need validation and schema for absolutely everything. Um, I think like once everybody sort of got in like or was Typescript pilled for a couple years, they're realizing, okay, I understand that everything is fully typed and validated. What else can be fully typed and validated? And that's when you get Zod pilled loads. Mine was Yeah. But you know what I find interesting here is that uh in a bubble bubble moment here effect only 48 respondents responded with effect and all you hear about is effect effect on Twitter and like nobody's putting effect on here. Also arch type folks 48 on arch type. Art type is sick. Y'all have to get on arch type. If you like zod you'll like arctype and valibot. Yeah. Yeah. before. That's the other thing about these things is people don't necessarily know what they don't know. Um that's why like momentjs has not been a good choice for what 5 years. Yeah. No kidding. And it's number four. And then like date functions number three. It's that's still a good choice but soon temporal will um will probably replace most of that. Uh load dash there's some use cases for load dash here and there, right? like little utility functions and you're doing especially you work with a lot of data I think that there's still use case for load dash there but not this many people right people don't necessarily know the alternatives yeah I pick up like just or but a lot of JavaScript now modern JavaScript has really added just writing a function yeah there's modern JavaScript has most of the stuff you need yeah um animations and stuff so chartjs has a 11 point increase. So chartjs went from like not being on here at all. How does that I wonder if some of these libraries are pushing people to vote cuz yeah chart js has been around for a long time. I mean it was one of the first tutorial courses I did on level up tutorials back in like 2012 13 was chartjs. So, uh, 3JS, shocking that it's decreased considering 3JS continues to get more impressive every single uh, day. Gap on here at number five. D3 is number three. Um, yeah, Motion, formerly Framer Motion on here is number four. Motion's a great library. Uh, surprising that React Spring is still on this list because, man, React Spring wasn't even fun to use when it came out. And, uh, it's been a long time since then. Yeah, I'm glad to see motion nice and high up here. I wonder if we'll ever see anything different than 3JS, you know, like it just seems like such a powerhouse of a library. There's Is there any alternatives to to 3JS? I guess you can write it from scratch. 3JS. Everything is like built on like isn't D3 built on top of 3JS? I don't want to say Did I get that wrong? Oh, no. I'm I'm I'm dumb. I was thinking about something different. Yeah, I would say I don't is a charting library. it's like a SVG library. All right. If we scroll down and look at utilities like what people are using, you know, ESLint prettier. Looks like 90% people still using ESLint 86% as prettier. We've seen a lot of like disruption in this space in the last little bit. namely Biome and Oxlin Ox format sort of coming out and providing compatible APIs or or or simple just like like better APIs that are or way faster but most people still on old faithful eslint and prettier um but biome 16% and then oxint 1%. I would have if you were to tell me like which one is way more popular right now based on just my like ears on talking to people I would say Oxent but it's Biome is 16 times bigger. Yeah, Biome I think for being first to market in that regard as being the nice alternative there but Biome yeah Biome's fine for me. I I occasionally see the Biome process on my computer going absolutely apeshit. So I don't know what's going on there. So, I I've personally been looking forward to Oxalent because I do feel like their approach is possibly a bit uh more a bit more possible for consistency amongst uh moving into different frameworks or HTML or CSS. I see it as being a better long-term option. I would have to imagine by the time that this says uh JS 2026 here, Oxent will be way higher than it is in this one because I think people are going to I think it's going to be a thing that people are going to discover this year. If if you're if you've never heard of it like OXC is like it's from the folks at Vit or I think the like creator of it has joined Void Zero. Um, and that oxe tool is like it parses and transforms I was going to say JavaScript, but it parses and transforms languages, you know, like JavaScript, JSX, JSON, HTML, CSS, view templates, all all of that stuff, right? Um, and then when you have a parser and transformer, then you can build things like a llinter like ESLint or a formatterater like prettier. And those are the two things. And I I'm kind of glad to see this as well because like I feel like now that most of the industry has standardized on using VIT and now everybody's moving to using VIT test and then the next thing is that people are going to be using the llinter and formatter from that ecosystem and then what what's next JavaScript framework? Yeah. Yeah. And I I think the reason why I prefer uh the oaxc is is like what they exactly say here is oxalent leverages native uh go port of the typescript compiler providing full typescript compatibility is by contrast biome is to implement its own type inference instead of relying on the typescript compiler. To me, using the go port of TypeScript and actually using TypeScript instead of uh writing your own is like that to me seems a more scalable approach. Uh also you can have plugins that are compatible with ESLint with Oxlint. So therefore, you know, your ecosystem is is going to be larger. So Oxent to me very exciting option, something that I'd be uh definitely poised to see increase in usage. Um, JS runtimes. Number one is obviously Node.js for people out there. I I think there's like a weird kind of like Twitter subset of like people who think that like bun is it for everything, but Node clearly top dog, top banana still, uh, browser obviously, but then no bun being number three with a huge increase. I have noticed like a lot of AI bros, a lot of like non-developer types like just talk about bun as being the thing. I I feel the same way as well and I love bun. I've got many videos on bun. I use it on a lot of my projects and how obnoxious the bun guys on Twitter are. When you post anything about node, it's all it's always just use bun, just use bun. It seems really big in the like um um like student area you know vibe code student area and it's being obviously bun was purchased by anthropic will bun become like a like a re like a runtime that like obviously it is right now but like it seems like the place for bun is people are sticking it in obviously cloud code right that's what power powers cloud code I know open code used to use bun and they swap swapped it out for no just cuz they were having issues with with Windows. But like maybe that's the the move is that people are bun is just going to be this like nucleus engine that they can stick into products that get shipped. Yeah. I in my experience I found bun to be buggy or have issues and like that's just my personal experience but like using the bun adapter for spelt kit like occasionally there's issues there but uh using bun for openclaw won't work so you have to use pnpm or npm and node like there I I have hit a number of like times when bun just doesn't work and and I don't know if that's like I'm just hitting weird edges cuz I'm on, you know, weird stacks or different things here and there. But I I don't know if that's that's common. But me personally, I that's one I don't have any problems with node. Node to me just works like that that was the other thing. And I think that if you if you take a look at Dino, Dino is at 11%, went down 1%. And I I don't I think that Dino didn't go down because Bun got more popular. I think Dino went down simply because people were fine with Node. Node added a lot of the stuff that we wanted, right? You can Yeah, you can run TypeScript in Node without a plugin now. You can you can load your environmental variables in without a plugin now. You know, like a lot of the just like little paper cuts of Node are solved. And a lot of people were saying it's fine. It's fast enough. It works great for me and I'm I'm happy with it. But what else? Cloudflare workers went up 12%. That's Cloudflare has had a hell of a year just seeing how many people like almost nobody was using Cloudflare workers. A year ago. According to the survey I when was my first Cloudflare workers video cuz I feel like I was early. Six years ago I posted a video here's what Cloudflare workers do. Um but obviously as Cloudflare has pushed their workers platform more into like oh this this can be used much more than just like a little middleware now like you could build entire apps on it. You got databases and images and they have email now like they're they're almost like the full stack now. So a lot more people are opting to just build straight on that. And they sorted out their like running it locally. They have this thing called the engine behind cloud for workers is not node, right? It's node compatible. It's their own runtime. It's called workerd. And for the longest time still still have pain points where like it doesn't it doesn't work exactly how you would expect it to do locally versus when you deploy it. But they've sorted out a lot of that by allowing you to run workerd locally and you can you hit those issues before you spend three minutes waiting for your build to go through. Yeah. Yeah, interesting stuff. Um, hosting I think is interesting. AWS is top dog. Forcel number two. Uh, GitHub pages is number three. Okay. Um, Netlefi number four. Cloudflare at number five, but a massive increase. I could imagine Cloudflare becoming an easy uh uh number three on this by next year with the I don't know. I'm surprised that Cloudflare's number five if we're being honest. Um, but I man I think like the the people that are using GitHub pages are doing it because they want somewhere to host their stuff for free, right? And they're maybe they're sticking it they're building it every single pull request. You can do that on Cloudflare now for either free or they're like $5 plan will cover a lot of it. If you're like, I want to put this somewhere but I don't feel like paying for it. Yeah, that's a good spot to throw all of your like little oneoff projects. Totally. Netifi still a huge one. Firebase. This is this is odd to me. Firebase was 1% now is 21%. Okay. What? That seems like a weird something weird in the data. Not not like I don't even Yeah, I don't know. I don't necessarily understand. I do know that like the AI does pick Firebase quite often for building apps, right? And and especially if you want to build like some quick little real-time app, Firebase is huge for that. But and then also you can host it on Firebase. That seems crazy though. Uh Coolifi number 15 on the list with 6% cooly. I I like Coolifi. I host a lot of stuff on there. text editors, 84% on VS Code, 26% on cursor. Man, that's another one that surprises me. If you were to ask me, I you you ask anybody and they say, "I was on cursor until January and now I'm don't even use an editor at all. I just cloud code prompt in my brains and and ship it. Who cares?" But that does not seem to be the case here. It seems like VS Code still massive massive lead over cursor and that's my experience. I don't I I've never really found cursor to be that much beyond VS Code. I know you like it and I know you have good arguments for that. Uh but VS Code has always done done the trick for me. The the editor I use most these days is Zed though. And Zed being number five on the list, Zed is not without its issues. You know, there's there's uh it's still very fresh. But if we're talking like performant text editors that are like a guey based text editor, it it's nice. Very nice. I was thinking about you using Zed the other day and I thought like now now's the time to switch your editor because so much is changing, right? Um like a lot of people don't want to switch their editor because their ESLint and prettier finally works when they hit save in formats and they don't want to fuss with it anymore. They're not going to switch, right? But now, oh, you're going to you're switching to Oxlint or Biome. Um, oh, and you're you're using Cloud Code instead of like like GitHub Copilot. Uh, like there's a lot of like change happening right now in the tools that you use. And when that happens, when you're using a new framework, you're using new formatterers, new llinters, all that type of stuff, it's not that big of a jump to also switch the the editor, right? You got to get your keyboard shortcuts in place, but it's a good good use case. Sublime Text, who's still using Sublime Text? 8.89. 8% of people still using Sublime Text. More people using Sublime Text than Windsurf. That is unreal. That's I mean I don't I don't know anybody that uses Windsurf, but uh you know, Sublime Text, sure I I do see people on Reddit be like, "It just works for me. It's you know, it's fine. It's performant." But still that's like still using text wrangler in 2026. You know I I actually have some insights into the sublime text is I have a book on sublime text or I I did have a book and a a course on sublime text and I deprecated it three years ago put a huge banner. You load the page there's like a huge overlay. this is out of date, totally deprecated, and people still close that and buy it and and don't ask for a refund. Um, and I think it is a lot of Python developers who are in the um like education data science space where like that whole like Python data science is like a totally different world than like uh web development. So I think that's who's still using this type stuff. But then what are they doing taking stats? Yeah, I don't know what they're doing. Killed to see what's in these uh other answers down here. Uh because there's 179 people who've answered something that's not on here and I'm I'm just dying to know if anybody put code. Well, you can look at the data query builder. I just went through the GraphQL API for StataJS, which is sick that they give you an API. You can pull the data yourself. Uh what do we got here? Quite a few people, eight people using Atom, three people using Android Studio. Um, lots of like online code sandbox, code spaces, Notepad++. Come on, text. Who's still using Textmate? That's what people using text. Textmate. Is there anybody put KOD? I got to know. Trey, nobody put Kod. Okay, that's quite a few people are saying Trey. Visual Studio. Visual Studio Enterprise VS Codium, that's like the open source fork of VS Code or the distributed version. I'm gonna respond next year to the survey saying I'm using Dreamweaver to throw off the data. Oh, remember Fleet? We were in the beta test for that. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Fleet was like the VS Code competitor from Intelligtorm or telling Webtorm. Yeah. Yeah. Whatever happened to that? Is it people still doing that? I asked the folks uh because um someone that works at on Webstorm was at our syntax meet up in San Francisco. Yeah. And I was asking them about and the answer was uh I think uh I think there's some internal confusion over uh what was what there. So it's a nice looking editor, but I ain't got time for that. We also have AI tools in here where uh a large amount of people 6,000 people put chat GPT is number one. And uh those people just plug it into chat GPT. I guess I would I would recommend that. Like I get that's a you know something that I'll pick up every now and again. But yeah, interesting that it's like the number one. I think like that one is probably number one because like if you're asking what AI tools do you use? People are going to be like ch and and then they insert their like co-pilot 51% claude at 44%. And then it's interesting this is a huge amount for claude versus cursor. It's almost double what cursor usage is. And this was before the the January clottification of everybody. The clottification. Yes. You know the clicification. The cl Yes. But I would have thought cursor cursor 26%. Again, you ask me what is the entire world using months ago. I would have said cursor. Yeah. No, I wouldn't have. No, I would I would have cursor. I would have said co-pilot. Yeah. Yeah. You're right. That's what people everybody's bagging on Copilot, but they don't realize how much of a like a the fact that everybody was already using VS Code and GitHub, how much of a advantage they have there. Yeah. Meanwhile, Open Code at only 58 respondents at number 14 doesn't even get a point. It has a point or 05 05 percentage points here. Okay. I gotta know. Uh, nearly 1% of the people here put Grock. You're coding with Grock. We did I we did a VIP code video and I use Grock. What are you doing? Free for like three or four months. That's probably why. My god, dude. Oh my god. That's crazy. Um, that's shocking to me. Give me the Grock coding model. I I like they have it I guess but like where's a Grock CLI? But if there's all these other things out there that are so much better, what's possessing you to pick that? It's free. It's because it was free. That's I guarantee that's why if you if you download install open code it like for the longest time it defaulted to Grock because Gro and then people were were just using that for everything and it's it's no longer free. So we'll see what it is next year. I we almost need this like what AI tools are using. You need this like every 3 weeks. Every 3 weeks. Yes, for sure. Yeah. Um, also in like AI code generation, real quick, 0% of people said they are generating 100% of their code with AI, which is and just the spread in general was much more comforting than I would have thought. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. The average is 26% or no, the average is 29%. 29%. Yeah. 29%. 10% of folks are not using any AI. So, we do get a lot of comments about people who are like, I'll never touch AI for anything. Yeah. All right. Well, that is it's now 10% and it was 19% last year. Yeah. 20%. So, it's gone down by half. So, I wouldn't be surprised to see this get cut in half again by next year, folks. Buckle up, folks. Cool. Buckle up. Awards. We like to vote on these. Um, the most adopted technology over the past year, the most adopted. So like Vit has been like the answer to all of these like every year. So you can't be continually the most adopted, right? I mean that that you can't continue that. I'm going to say V test. Yeah, I'm going to say it's probably V test. And then number two is going to be playright and then it it usually tells you number three as well. Like those it's so clearly V and playright but like what would number three be? Vit probably honestly I think it probably is. All right. Three, two, one. Vest number two playright. Playright. Number three turbo pack. that actually makes sense given the dominance that Nex.js has and now turbo pack is stable. So that actually makes sense. 9% increase. Highest satisfaction Vit. Yeah, probably Vit. This is just the awards go to Vit. All right. Three. Oh, no. Should we guess second and third place? So, it's a kind of interesting. I already clicked it. Sorry. Okay. Um, well, I haven't looked. I'm going to I'm going to look. Um, playright and view. Okay, you were wrong on both. Number two, Vest. Number three, hono or hono, whatever. However you say it. I say every Japanese word wrong, so don't trust me. Um, but VET 98% of its users having a positive opinion about it. Uh, this is the equivalent of uh what did Drake say? He said something about uh Kendrick just did something. Let's give him a Grammy. Um, I don't like Drake and Kendrick deserves those Grammys. Uh, so V, you deserve these Grammys. Uh, I'll just say that Hano deserves those Grammys finally. You know, Hano getting some love over here. I feel like we've been talking about Hano for years and now it's it's getting some love here. Highest interest awarded to the technology developers are most interested in learning once they are aware of it. This is tough. Vest just because I'm going to say V test then Astro then uh Hono I'm going to say playright. It's because those were the two big ones, right? I'm going to say playright. Three, two, one. V test number two roll down makes sense that's the um engine behind V and then play right 76% people are interested in most writins tan stack start tack start FNM Tanac start coming in at number two number one is FNM what's that I know about H&M fast node manager what yeah what ooh Cool. What do you What do you use to switch your node versions? I use NVM and I hate it. I use N and I love it. Except I always forget what the commands are. Yeah, my AI is always like, "That's the wrong node version." I'm like, "You're using Node Verge, man. Take care of it, brother. You can handle it. You got to do some work, Scott." No. Oh, this is cool. I have never had an issue with how fast my switching of node is, but maybe people who are like like running tests against multiple versions of node. I could see that that being that's enough to put it number one in writing FML. Although I do have every now and then because I have like weird issues with my node where you switch the npm version and it's like something got wrong. You got to run this mod 749 and fix it. I don't know why we'll fix it. Version managing is horrible for me. So F&M you're on my radar starting right now. And uh the most commented library. Which library received the most comments? Library. Next.js. JS. Yeah, definitely next.js. Then tan sex start second and Astro third. Astro second and then it doesn't matter. Three one next.js 69 comments. Webpack and React. Uh Webpack and React. Oh, that's true. People love bitching about those things. So that makes sense. That's Yeah, this is the most bitched about uh category here. I will say Wes, can we just give me an award? I got four of these five correct and the only one I didn't get right was F&M and I got Tanstex start as number two. So, you have got your finger on the pulse there, Scott. I I congratulate you. Oh, thank you so much. I think I've Yeah, I know I've done these too many times to just know that the answers to most of them are V and Vest. So, uh well, um that is state. Props to Sasha for putting that out again. That's always super fun to go through every single year. I am going to go install F&M. Yeah. Hey, I'm gonna go install F&M, too. Do you have any sick pics you'd like to to get through? I got this for Christmas, and it's something that I've been wanting forever. And this is a battery powered heat gun. Um, so heat gun I use quite a bit. you know, you got shrink wrap or if you need to heat something up to take like a component off of a board or surprisingly, one thing I use a lot for is my wife comes home shopping and there's stickers on it. Absolutely everything. And those stickers always come off brutally, right? You got to peel it and you got to get the goo. If you just heat them up a little bit, peel, they come off way easier. And I always get annoyed with my heat gun because it's the same thing with the glue gun. I got a battery powered glue gun as well. I was like, I'm not near an outlet and I'm doing something where I need to put heat on something. And uh I was like, you know what? It's it's not as like like powerful as like a plug-in one and it doesn't run as as as long, but I often don't need it to be super hot. I just need to be like good enough and I need to be wireless. So, um I got this one. It takes DeWalt batteries. Um I'll link up the one I I actually ended up getting and it works awesome. It It surprisingly heats up pretty quickly and it gets hotter than I like. Probably like 7 800 degrees, which is very hot. That is very hot. Uh I'm going to sick pick something that I Amazon says I've purchased a lot of times and uh I've sickpicked this before, but it's been a long enough here that I feel like I should I should mention this thing. Uh Anker, maker of really nice stuff in general. Um, the Anker cube is this little cube. It's currently on sale right now. You can get for 83 bucks, but it charges your AirPods on the side here or the AirPods go on the right top here. It charges your Apple Watch and then it does Mag Safe right here. And it just plugs in with a USBC. So, it's the three-way charger here. And man, this is something I just like this is a gift I buy for people. Like I got my dad one for his desk. But the best part about these things is that like for travel, it just is it shows up in this little cube. Now you got a three-way charger that's not some like obnoxious crazy shape to fit in your luggage. It packs so nicely cuz it's this little cube. And since it's just USBC, you can throw your normal any USBC charger on this bad boy. Uh big fan of this device. And it it probably like does fast charging, right? Like it charges your phone fast. That's so key when you're traveling. Um you got like the the mobile SIM, you know, you get an e SIM and my battery drains when I've got the the e SIM going and when I'm you're obviously you got maps and you're you're out and about taking photos. Um and nothing is more important than you're back at the hotel for 45 minutes, you know, you got to you got to charge your phone as as fast as possible. It's so nice having a you just slap it on there. You charge your watch. That's key for uh for traveling. love this thing. So, I I've uh purchased a number of them for for various folks in my life. But shout out to Anker for making a cool little cube. Wes, do you have anything else for us? Any parting thoughts? Any final words? That's it. Thanks so much for tuning in. Leave us below what your favorite thing of the year was and we'll catch you in the next one. Subscribe, like, comment, do everything. Peace. Peace.