The state of JS survey just dropped in February 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 gonna be breaking down what's interesting about the state of JS 2025.

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, 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 Scott, 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.

Wes do you wanna kick this off? Do we wanna start on the library? There's the the whole section on here for JavaScript features.

As you mentioned Wes we were talking about this preshow, it's gotten kind of less interesting.

Like, oh, okay. We're still talking about nullish coalescing.

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, resources, all of those things that people are using, those have quite a bit, 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 gonna 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 popularity over time Wes there's a graph here. 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 is a backwards c Wes they start and, you know, peep 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 Node, 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, React, and some of them to a much different degree. Like, Webpacks is crazy. Webpacks is, like, way far to the, negative opinions and have used territory. But what I think is interesting is the ones that don't follow the same shape, 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 Svelte 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 Node, and I think solid does have a general sentiment of being a solid choice. Right? Like a a Yeah. And 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 that. To it pretty quickly.

I feel like the people that use Solid are generally a little bit little bit more advanced Yes. And care about the the nitty gritty. You know? Right? They have a taste. Most people will just kinda, like, default to writing React.

And then once you you either get really good at React or you you kinda look for something else, and that's kinda where you start dipping into to Vue and Svelte 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, v Wes for one. I think v test is still on the way up. People are realizing it's so fast and wonderful. And if you're using Vitez, Vitez just makes sense. Playwright is one of these things that I think people were paying attention to and then maybe over swung on it a little bit. And then now with AI, people are back to using and enjoying Playwright because it's doing a lot of nice automation for them. Another one I noticed in here is Vite in general has a much larger version of this massive s shape. So what what's so interesting about this is that this does typically follow a number of standard shapes. It's like the backward c where something gets popular, and then everybody hates it.

But then what I don't understand is why so many of them have the same s shape where they're they're really, have positive opinions slightly negative the previous year and then positive the the year before that and then, like, the long tail 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, backward c is happening, and it pulls it back. But Veet, oh my gosh. Veet is the most popular, most used tool on the planet, and I don't feel like that should be any surprise, folks. That is

Yeah. My personal experience, that's the way it goes. The one interesting one that popped out to me here is the Angular.

Yeah.

What it does is it it kinda had, like, a it it this survey has been around so long that they're they're almost at ten years now. Right? 2016, the data goes back.

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 kinda slowly moved towards being more used and negative opinions. But then 2023 got positive again. You know? Swiped right back.

And then the 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 Wes you could see, like, the true Angular boom. Because people who started aft like, post React don't really understand that, like, everything everyone was picking up was either Everything. 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 MoCA here, which is just, like, on consistent. It's like a straight line to the left from positive to negative. Doesn't even get higher or lower. It just gets Wes 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 kinda crazy. Yeah. 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, Vite, Hano, Playwright, Astro, Bun in the s tier. I'm surprised about Astro being in s tier. Not because Astro's 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, Wes 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. 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.

Yeah.

I think tier list tier list that's interesting here is that Next. Js is in the c tier, which is the lowest tier.

That's where I would personally, put it. But, like, I'm also a hater. So, like, I'm surprised to see this JS so low when you look at, like, what it's next to. It's next to Gatsby. Like, who's using Gatsby still? Selenium, who's using Selenium? Webpack, like, Mocha, Cypress.

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 Playwright

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 probably are gonna go back to, like, flaky MoCA Wes, these annoying Cypress Wes, you know, like, oh, Angular one.

Angular's in the c tier as well. You Node? 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, static site build to, like, a a huge pain to actually deploy. But next as well is just it's 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 Next. Js and say, React bad, you know, like Scott Oh, React? Here. React has 72%

in the, favorability score, where Next. Js has 55%.

So it's not just React bad.

Also, like I I would put myself in in that category as well. So I think that makes 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, hit myself in the foot with a hammer instead of, picking this other tool up.

Alright. Next one we have here is ratios over time. The prize for the largest relative usage increase goes to Wes and Playwright. So that means, like, so many people are moving their testing setups over, away from what was the one before Playwright? Why am I even forgetting this? Sybarites.

No.

Playwright is was a fork of, puppeteer. That's what it was. Oh, puppeteer. Yes. Yeah. And then and V Wes was like it's like MoCA compatible. Right? But the biggest increases that we have here, if you look at the largest increases and the largest decreases JS obviously, v went up, what, 6%.

ESBuild, a a a 6% increase as well. V test, huge increase. Playwright, big increase. Nest JS coming in this one. I I don't know anybody that uses Nest JS, and and Same. Probably all the comments are gonna get mad at me. Not to say that they they don't

people don't use it, but that's a a surprising thing. Angular thing. I think, Angular folks use.

Nest. Yeah. You're right. Wes. JS is very popular in 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 this survey. So 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 JS far as usage goes, the largest decrease in any of these, it's it's mostly just ones that haven't increased. It it's like there's not, like, a huge downturn in it. Nothing has, like, tanked here, so I don't think there's anything all that interesting there.

Yeah. Positivity, I think, is an interesting Node, especially be if we looked at that that previous chart where it shows over time, there's that that c shaped curve. You kinda see that exact same shape in some of these Wes it's like instead of being a it looks more like a rainbow Wes, you know, over time, they these things just get less and Wes, popular or, 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, the ones that everybody knows about.

Interestingly enough, there's a 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, respondents, who voted for Ember here. The 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 it JS I've been kinda keeping up with this.

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 have been ignoring it all the time. This is ripple.-ts.com.

The what what is this? A TypeScript UI framework?

Yeah. Ripple is it's inspired by it it's it's it's an entirely unique thing. It is inspired by Svelte Solid and React.

They have an interesting syntax. You'll you'll recognize some of this as being like, it does feel like Svelte mixed with React. If somebody was like, let me take some of this stuff, like the way that state is being done.

It's not being done through, you know, ruins, but there is a track function. And that's you're saying, alright. We're tracking this value. And then there's derived values. There's, like, some symbols because this is a a compiled language. But then in terms of, like, how you're authoring components, you're export exporting a component function kind of.

So it functions it's like a it's its own syntax.

And and so, therefore, it solves some of the issues of Svelte, like, defining multiple components per file, and using them like functions. And then it also solves some of the things of React like it has by default, scope styling. ESLint interesting syntax. It's an interesting language.

It's still very fresh, but I'm in their Discord. I've been, 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 that the people behind it are are, bright. ESLint, interesting to see that show up.

Next one is meta framework ratios over time. So this one is pretty clear that Next. Js is is still top dog here. In fact, their usage percentage went up 4%.

And if you look at their interest or satisfaction, they all went down, which is is kinda interesting. Maybe it's a lot of people just vibe coding stuff, and it uses Next. Js by default. So if we look at usage, Astro's usage has shot up, 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's still pretty low. So for usage being at number two and, awareness is number four, people are like as they're becoming aware of Astro Yarn really liking it. Interest is number one. Satisfaction for Astro is number Node. Knocking off Top Dog's SvelteKit.

My my boy look at how they massacred my boy here. Astro has taken down SvelteKit. SvelteKit's Node number two. And then appreciation, this is interesting.

I don't what is appreciation is the gap between interest and satisfaction.

So Astro's appreciation has gone down which is interesting. 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 positivity Astro number one all the way down from number four in 2021

up to number one. What's really interesting to me here is that TanStack Scott is not on this list at all. Now granted, they they took this survey probably as TANSAX Scott was just in in beta.

But if you scroll down to other meta frameworks, like, what else are people ESLint? 50% of the people that wrote something in were were using TANSAX 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 tan stack start popping, absolutely popping. And then right below that is is tan stack router as well. Like, a lot of people are simply just the core of Tansac Scott is it's it's a router. Right? So that most people are simply just using the Tansac 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.

There's also Vik, v I k e? Never heard of this.

Vik?

I'm pretty sure we had this conversation last year when we did this this episode.

Composable framework to build advanced applications with blazing fast quick start next generation.

Your stat your choice. They nail all the words. Blazing flat fast, next generation, DX, unprecedented flexibility.

It it looks like you you bring your own stuff. You you can choose your front end framework or your, back end framework, it looks like, or your your transport AI. Alternative.

Feek, getting in there. What else? Expo Eleventy Eleventy, 4% lower. I think the we've said this for a couple Yarn now, but the the static site, like, the entire website being a static site generator, seems to have have, like, fully gone away. 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 you see a little bit of something that's not static. You know? I Node it to be a little bit more flexible, and then you realize, I I probably shouldn't have done this whole thing as static.

I just need a little bit of dynamicness.

Little bit of dynamism.

Yes.

Dynamism.

Yes.

A little bit of that. Let's talk I I just wanna hit real quick the meta framework pain point. And the highest pain point for people is excessive complexity, which like yeah. Excessive complexity.

You Node, 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 Wes, 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. Yeah. And then you have to wire that up together. It all feels, like, complex. So Using them all 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 Vercel components in in Next. Js is the ability to fetch data in the component, be able to use React suspense.

Now you can use the same thing in in Svelte ESLint as Wes, asynchronous Svelte.

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 wanna, like, not cache the entire page, but you wanna 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, 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 back end frameworks, it it does seem like well, it does Node that it does seem like it seems like by this chart, Express is still the top to us. By far. Like, Express far. 80%.

Nest, 32%.

Yeah. Express is such a weird one where and, like, I have I have 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 Mhmm. Handlers. And especially when you have your your auth and everything just wound into the that as middlewares, it's such a big job to move that into the next generation, which is like like WebRequest, Wes Response, which everything else uses now. Right? 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 on, like, a standard web web Wes, web response.

Yeah. 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 it. But I do have I have noticed personally, some AI defaulting to express for things. Yeah.

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 SvelteKit site. I have my agents tuned. It knows that it's a SvelteKit site. And it's I'm like, why the f are you doing an express route? It's like, well, we needed a route for the Wes the the API. It's like, brother, you have the whole API system baked into the app. Like, why why you setting up a separate express server? I would never ask you to do that. Deno showing up for the first time in 15%.

I would love to see next Yarn, Hano shooting up and express shooting down, personally. That's what I'd like to see. Yeah. I so I linked up this express Vercel Deno, and you can kinda see

every single NPM package right now is seeing, like, double numbers, 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. Honnold's Hanold's is biting the heels of that. And, also, Hanold's used in a lot of of the meta framework. Even if you don't know that you're using HONL, it's often it's either Nitro or HONL. 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.

Yeah. It 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.

Did you see the amplifying dot AI? They had this, 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 a back end app. They had, I think, they had a Python app, and they had a Next. Js app. And then they asked it several questions of, like, what should I use for styling? What should I use for components? Where should I host this? What should I use for, error monitoring? And Mhmm. They tracked what Cloud Code gave them, from the different models. And it it's significantly different between the latest Opus update and and the ones that were, what, Sanity 4.5 versus Opus 4.5.

Like, Express just wiped off the map Really? In the latest one.

Prisma to Drizzle Wes 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. I had a salad delivery.

Oh.

Homemade naan brand? Scott some I got all kinds of stuff in here. My life is the best. Shout out to Courtney.

Yeah. So Cool. Look at this. They asked, like, what ORM should I be using? Sonnet four five was Prisma 79% of the time.

Opus four five was Drizzle 60% of the time, and then Opus four six Drizzle a 100% of the time. So, like, it's clear that they are training these things. Either they're they're taking the, like, the feedback as to, like, when they suggested something, and then they they train the model on it, be 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. Yeah. Straight into it. Because they're they certainly did that for getting rid of the Vercel. You know? In these models, they had to beat the purple out of out of these models, and it the purple is almost entirely gone. It's been replaced with, like, model space fonts and and putting circles around there or border borders around everything. But that was unreal that this is like there's like a clogged 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.

Like, authentication, custom DIY. Like, we're better off on this because I always do I I use better off for everything. Yeah. I I do wonder, yeah, how much of this is just from the training Vercel. Like, how are they steering this if at all? Really fascinating stuff. But I gotta say Scott out to, century, number one in observability. It's picked the most amount of times, and I gotta say for good reason because it's excellent. So check it out, century.io/syntax.

Sign up to use the, coupon code Sanity treat, all lowercase, all one get two months for free. I gotta say, man, Wes, speaking of observability, I've been observing my agents.

So I put in Century 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 Century. 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

working on the same common tool call?

My most common tool call. Let's see.

In the we'll do in, the last ninety days, My most common tool call is read. Read.

And 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 because there's so much data in here.

Like, Wes, Svelte Auto Fixer called 248 times, tasks, 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 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 gotta have some observability into that. What's it doing? Yeah.

Yeah. That's good. Yeah. Also, if, like, you know where your your money's going. Right? If if your, tokens are being wasted on specific tool calls, you might not necessarily Node.

Oh, man. I spent $300 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, optimizing process.

You know me.

Alright. Back to state of JS. Let's talk about testing frameworks and and kinda what's being used right now. So if we go down to Wes 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 V Wes or whatever, but these big tools take a long time to to dethrone. But Yeah. V test coming in at number three.

Storybook still coming in at number two as well, which is impressive, and Playwright coming up. So that the whole story of the Scott of JS JS Vtest and Playwright are just absolutely climbing. Everybody's using that lately.

Yeah. Yeah. Wow. That's just a big climbs for Playwright.

Big climbs for V Wes. I think V test is still going to keep climbing because you still have a lot of folks who aren't even on feet, which, like, I'm sorry because it's it's just so wonderful. Yeah. I I I find this to be really interesting. BUNTES showing up in here as well.

Yeah. Really interesting stuff. I don't even think you you don't even need to be on Vite to to make Vite Wes work. Is that true? Yeah. Because, like like, most people have, like, some expect or, like, MoCA. Like, you have some sort of, unit Wes.

And you in many cases, you can simply just swap these things over. Right? You're using Wes or whatever. You can just swap over the packages, and they will simply just work.

I I think a lot of the pain people have with with Jest and whatever is that it still needs common JS, 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 v Wes, which is it's testing it as as your code is running.

Node JS it's running, but it's it's testing it as if it were bundled for production.

And then also Playwright, 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 Wes. The 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. Yeah. And if we look at the pain points, number one being mocking, but performance being number three, which I think those folks who have listed performance could, give v Wes a try.

So other tools here, these are just general libraries. We have Zod up top here.

So shocking amount of people still listing, Lodash.

Bro.

4,000 people. Lodash. Lodash, I'm surprised underscore isn't on here if the Lodash is his heist. Hold on. If we, it is. It's number 12.

Still 7% of people, 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 gonna 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.

Everybody is realizing, man, I need validation and schema for absolutely everything.

I think, like, once everybody sort of got in, like, warp was TypeScript filled for a couple years, they're realizing, okay. I I understand that everything is fully typed and validated.

What else can be Yeah. Fully typed and validated? And that's when you get Node pilled. Node You know what? Mindless. Yeah. Wes know what I find interesting here is that, in a bubble bubble moment here,

effect.

Only 48 respondents responded with effect, and all you hear about is effect effect effect on Twitter. And Yeah. Like, nobody's putting effect down here. Also, archetype, folks. 48 on archetype. Arctype is sick. Y'all have to get on archetype. If you like Zod Valabot. You like archetype and Valabot. Yeah.

Yeah. Before that's the other thing about these things JS people don't necessarily know what they don't know.

That's why, like, Moment JS has not been a good choice for what? Five years? Yeah. They'll give you. Yeah. Number four. And then, like, date functions, number three. It's that's still a good choice, but soon, temporal will, will probably replace most of that.

Lodash, there's some use cases for Lodash 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 Lodash there, but not Yeah. This many people. Right? No. I people don't necessarily know the alternatives.

Yeah. I pick up, like, just or but I I have JavaScript now. Modern JavaScript is really added to Just writing a function. Yeah. There's Yeah.

Modern JavaScript has most of the stuff you need.

Yeah.

Animations and stuff. So Chart JS has a 11 increase.

So Chart JS went from, like, not being on here at all. How does that make you sense? Vercel. I thought

JS some of these libraries are pushing people to vote because

Yeah. 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, twenty twelve, thirteen was Chart JS. So, Three JS, shocking that it's decreased considering Three JS continues to get more impressive every single, day.

GSAP on here at number five.

D three is number three.

I yeah. Motion, formerly Framer Motion on here is number four. Motion's a great library.

Surprising that React Spring is still on this list because, man, React Spring wasn't even fun to use when it came out. And, 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 Three JS, you know? Like, it just seems like such a powerhouse of a library. There's JS there any alternatives to to Three JS? I Wes, it's like built on top of Three. Yes. Everything is, like, built on like, isn't d three built on top of Three. Js?

I don't want to say that.

Wrong. Oh, no. I'm I'm I'm done. I was thinking about something different. Yeah. I would say I don't give it a a charting library. Yeah. It's like Wes SVG library.

Yeah. Alright. 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 auxlin, aux format Scott of coming out and providing compatible APIs or or or simple just like like better APIs that are warp way faster.

But most people still on old faithful ESLint and Prettier.

But Biome, 16%, and then Oxlint, 1%. I would.

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 Oxlint.

But it's Biome is 16 times bigger.

Yeah. Biome, I think, for being first to market in that regard JS being the nice alternative there. I like Biome. Bio yeah. Biome's fine for me. I I occasionally see the Biome process on my computer going absolutely ape shit. So I don't know what's going on there. So I I personally been looking forward to ESLint because I do feel like their approach is possibly a bit, more a bit more possible for consistency amongst, 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, JS twenty twenty six here, ESLint will be way higher than it is in this one because I I think so as well. Gonna I think it's gonna be a thing that people are gonna discover this year.

If you're if you've never heard of it, like, OXC is like, it's from the folks at Vite, or I think the, like, creator of it has joined void zero.

Yeah. And that OXC tool is like it parses and transforms I was gonna say JavaScript, but it parses and transforms languages, you know, like JavaScript, JSX, JSON, HTML, CSS, Vue templates, all all of that stuff. Right? And then when you have a parser and transformer, then you can build things like a linter, like ESLint, or a formatter, like Prettier. And those are the two things. And I I'm kinda glad to see this as well because, like, I feel, like, now that most of the industry has standardized on using Vite, and now everybody's moving to using Vite Wes. And then the next thing is that people are going to be using the ESLint and formatter from that ecosystem. And then what what's next? A JavaScript framework?

Yeah. Yeah. And I think the reason why I prefer, the o o o x c is is, like, what they exactly say here JS, ESLint leverages native, Go port of the TypeScript compiler providing full TypeScript compatibility.

JS, 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, writing your own is like that to me seems a more scalable approach.

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 ESLint to me, very exciting option, something that I'd be, definitely poised to see increase in usage.

JS runtimes, number one is obviously Node JS for people out there. Yeah. 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, browser, obviously.

But then Node bun being number three with a huge increase. I have noticed, like, a lot of AI bros, a lot of, like, Node 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 Yarn, when you post anything about Node, it all it's always just use Bun. Just use Bun. And it seems really big in the, like, like, student area, you know, vibe Node, student area, and it's being obviously, Bun was purchased by Anthropic.

Will Bun become like a like a like a runtime that like, obviously, it is right Node, 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 Node used to use BUN, and they swapped it out for Node just because they were having issues with with Windows.

But, like, maybe that's the the move JS 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 SvelteKit, Like, occasionally, there's issues there, but, using BUN for OpenClot won't work, so you have to use PNPM or NPM Deno Node. Like, there I I have hit a number of, like, times when BUND just doesn't work, and and I don't know if that's like, I'm just hitting weird edges because 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's 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 Deno 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 plug in now. You can you can load your environmental variables in without a plug in now. You know, like, a lot of the just like a little paper cuts of Node are solved. And a lot of people warp 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%.

The Cloudflare has had a hell of a year just seeing how many people like, almost nobody was using Cloudflare Workers a year ago Yeah.

According to the survey. I when was my first CloudFlare workers video? Because I feel like I was early.

Six years ago, I posted a video. Here's what CloudFlare workers do.

But, obviously, as CloudFlare has pushed their workers' platform more ESLint, 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've 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 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 Wes, 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.

Hosting, I think, is interesting. AWS is top dog for cell, number two.

GitHub Pages is number three. Okay? Netlify, number four. CloudFlare, number five, but a massive increase. I could imagine CloudFlare becoming an easy, number three on this by next year with the I don't know. I'm surprised that CloudFlare JS number five, if we're being honest.

But I, man Yeah. 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 their, like, $5 plan will cover a lot of it. If you're like, I wanna 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 one off projects.

Totally.

Netlify is 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 that. I do know that, like,

the AI does pick Firebase quite often for building apps. Right? And and especially if you wanna 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. Interesting.

Coolify, number 15 on the list with 6%. Hell, yeah. I I like Coolify. I host a lot of stuff on there.

Text editors, 84% on Versus Node, 26% on Cursor. Man, that's another one that surprises me. If you were to ask me, I you you you you'd 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 Versus Node 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 Versus Code. I know you like it, and I know you have good arguments for that. But Versus 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 ESLint. Zed is not without its issues. You Node? There's there's, it's still very fresh. But if we're talking, like, performant text editors that are like a GUI 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? Like, a lot of people don't wanna switch their editor because their ESLint and Prettier finally works when they hit save in our formats, and they don't wanna fuss with it anymore. They're not gonna switch. Right? But now oh, you're gonna you're switching to ESLint or Biome.

Oh, and you're you're using Cloud Code instead of, like like, GitHub Copilot.

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 formatters, new linters, all that type of stuff, it's not that big of a jump to also switch the the editor. Right? You gotta get your keyboard shortcuts in place, but it's a good good use case.

Sublime tech who's still using sublime text? Eight eighty nine.

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 Wind Surf, but, 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 performing. But still I That's, like, still using Text Wrangler in 2026.

You know, I I actually have some insights into the sublime texts. I have a book on sublime text, or I I did have a book and a a course on sublime text. You do? 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. And I think it is a lot of Python developers who are in the, like, education Node science space. Mhmm. We're like, that whole, like, Python data science JS, like, a totally different world than, like, Wes development. So, I mean, I think that's who's still using this type of stuff. But then what are they doing taking Scott of JS? Yeah. I don't know what they're doing. They're doing the survey.

Kill to see what's in these, other answers down here, because there's a 179 people who've answered something that's not on here. And I'm I'm just dying to know if anybody put code on it. Well, you can look at the data. Query builder

I just went through the GraphQL API for Stata JS, which is sick that they give you an API. You can pull the data yourself.

What do we got here? Quite a few people, eight people using Atom, three people using Android Studio.

K.

Lots of, like, online Node sandbox, code spaces, Node plus plus. Come on.

Text who's still using TextMate? That's a lot of people. Vercel using TextMate? TextMate.

Is there anybody put Coda? I gotta know.

Trey, nobody put Coda.

Okay.

That's Quite a few people are saying Trey Visual Studio Visual Studio Enterprise, VSCodium.

That's like the open source fork of Versus Node or the distributed version.

I'm gonna respond next year to the survey saying I'm using Dreamweaver, but not if they're off the data. Oh, remember Fleet? We are in the beta test for that. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Wes like the Versus Code competitor from Pnpm Webstorm or Telenet. Storm. Yeah. Yeah. Whatever happened to that? Is the people still doing that?

I asked the folks, because, someone that works at on Webstorm was at our Syntax meetup in San Francisco. Yeah. And I was asking them about that. And the answer was, I think, I think there's Node internal confusion over, 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, a large amount of people, 6,000 people put chat g p t as number one.

And, and and those people just plug it into chat g p t, I guess. I would I would recommend that like, I get that's, you know, something that I'll pick up every now and again. But

yeah. Interesting that it's, like, the number one. That one is probably number one because, like, if you're asking what AI you use, people are gonna be, like, chat g p t and and then they insert their, like, Copilot, 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. Yeah. And this was before the the January clodification of everybody.

The clodification.

Yes. You know? The clover. Clover.

Yes.

But I would have thought cursor. Cursor, 26%.

Again, you asked me what is the entire world using.

Two months ago, I would have said cursor. Yeah. No. I wouldn't have. No. I wouldn't I wouldn't have said Cursor. I would have said Copilot. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. You're right. Yeah. That's what peep everybody's bagging on Copilot, but they don't realize how much of a, like, a the fact that everybody was already using Versus Node and GitHub, how much of a advantage they have there. Yeah. Meanwhile, OpenCoded,

only 58 respondents at number 14 doesn't even get a point JS a point or zero five Deno five percentage points here.

Okay. I gotta know.

Nearly 1% of the people here put Grok? You're coding with Grok?

We did I we did a Node video, and I use Grok. What are you doing? Free for, like, three or four months. That's probably why.

My god.

Dude. Oh my god.

That's crazy.

That's shocking to me.

Give me the Grok coding model. I I like, they have it, I Wes. But, like, where's a Grok 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 a guarantee. That's why. If you if you download install OpenCode,

it, like for the longest time, it defaulted to Grok because Grok was free. Yeah. 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 tool Yarn you using? We need this, like, every three weeks. Every three weeks. Yes. For sure.

Also in, like, AI code generation real quick, 0% of people said they are generating a 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. Alright? Well, that JS it's now 10%, and it was 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.

The most adopted technology over the past year.

The most adopted. So, like, Veet 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 No. Can't continue that. I'm gonna say v Wes. Yeah. I'm gonna

say it's probably v test, and then number two is gonna be Playwright.

And then it it usually tells you number three as well. Like, those it's so clearly v in Playwright, but, like, what would number three be?

Vite?

Probably.

Honestly, I think it probably is. Alright. Three, two, Node.

Vite Wes.

Number two,

Playwright. Playwright.

Number three, TurboPack.

Yeah. That actually makes sense given TurboPack.

Dominance that Next. Js has, and Yeah. Now turbo pack is stable. So that actually makes sense. 9% increase. Highest satisfaction.

Veet.

Yeah. Probably Veet. This is just the awards go to Vite. Alright. Three oh, no. Should we get second and third place so it's kinda interesting? I already clicked it. Sorry. Okay.

Well, I haven't looked. I'm gonna I'm gonna look.

Playwright and view.

K. You were wrong on both. Number two, v Wes.

Number three,

Node or hono, whatever, however you say it. I see every Japanese word wrong, so don't trust me.

V 98% of its users having a positive opinion about it.

This is the equivalent of, what did Drake say? He said something about, Kendrick just did something. Let's give him a Grammy.

I don't like Drake, and Kendrick deserves those Grammys.

So, Veep, you deserve these Grammys.

I'll just say that. Deserves those Grammys. Finally.

You know? Honno getting some love over here. I feel like we've been talking about Honno for years, and now it's it's getting some love here. Highest interest. Orders of the technology developers are most interested in learning once they are aware of it. This is tough.

V Wes.

Just peep cuts.

I'm gonna say V Wes, then Astro, then, Oh, no.

I'm a say Playwright.

It because those are the two big ones. Right? I'm Bos say Playwright. Three two Node, v test.

Number two, roll down. Makes sense. That's the engine behind v, and then playwright 76% people are interested in. Most Most write ins. Write ins. Tansac start. Pnpm? TANFAC Scott coming in at number two. Number one is FNM. What's that? I know about H and M. Fast Node manager. What?

Yeah. What?

Oh, what do you what do you use to switch your node versions? I use Npm, 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 a wrong node version. I'm like, you're using Node, man. Take care of it, brother. You can handle it. You gotta do some work, Scott.

No.

Oh, this is cool. I have never had an issue with how fast my switching of Node JS.

But maybe people who are, like like, running tests against multiple versions of Node, I could see that that being an issue. Put it number one in write ins above tan stack Scott.

Pnpm.

Interesting. FML. Although I do have Yeah. Every now and then because I have, like, weird issues with my node where you switch the Npm version.

Yeah. And it's like, something got wrong. You gotta run this seven

four Node and fix it. It's I don't know why Node will fix it. Vercel managing is horrible for me. So f and m, you're on my radar starting right now. And, the most commented library, which library received the most comments? Library. Next.

Yeah. Definitely Next. Wes. And Tansac Scott second and

Astro third. Astro second and then it doesn't matter. Three. Next. Js

Next. Js, 69 comments. Webpack and React.

Webpack and React. Oh, that's true. People love

bitching about those things. Oh, that makes sense. That's yeah. This is the most bitched about, 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 and M, and I got TanStack's start as number two. So You

I've 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 v test. So,

Well, that is State of Jazz. 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 and m.

Yeah. Hey. I'm gonna go install f and m too. Do you have any sick picks you'd like to to get through? I got this for Christmas, and Oh. It's something that I've been wanting forever. And this is a

battery powered heat gun.

So heat gun, I use quite a bit. You Node, 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 gotta peel it and you gotta get the goo gone. 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, 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 it to be, like, good enough, and I need Node to be wireless. So, I got this one. It takes DeWalt batteries.

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, seven, eight hundred degrees, which is very hot.

That is very hot.

I'm going to sick pick something that I Amazon says I've purchased a lot of times. And, I've sick picked this before, but it's been long enough here that I feel like I should I should mention this thing.

Anker, maker of really nice stuff in general.

The Anker cube is this little cube.

It's currently on sale right now. You can get for $83, 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 MagSafe right here. And it just plugs in with the USB c. 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 it 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 because it's this little cube. And since it's just USB c, you can throw your normal any USB c charger on this bad boy.

Big fan of this device. And it it probably, like, does fast charging. Right? Yeah. Like, it charges your phone fast. That's so key. When you're traveling, you got, like, the the mobile SIM. You know, you had an ESLint, and my battery drains when I've got the the eSIM going in Wes I'm you're obviously Scott maps, and you're you're out and about taking photos.

And nothing is more important than you're back at the hotel for forty five minutes.

You know? You gotta you gotta 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 a key for, for traveling.

Yeah.

Yeah. Love this thing. So I I've, 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.