Node.js Digest #27: State of JS 2025, Node.js Without AI, Deno Gets Shaken Up, TypeScript v6.0

Hello, community! Oleksandr Zinevych here with a new issue of the regular Node.js and server-side JavaScript news digest. This time we'll go without a video, but I'll make up for it next month 😉

Quick News:

🔸The Node.js team announced security update releases for the 25.x, 24.x, 22.x, and 20.x branches dated March 24, 2026. These patches fix a number of vulnerabilities.

🔸Starting with version 27.x (October 2026), Node.js is moving from two major releases per year to one, with each eventually receiving Long-Term Support (LTS) status. This decision aims to reduce the burden on volunteer maintainers and make the update schedule more predictable for businesses.

🔸Amazon S3 now has namespaces for general-purpose buckets;

🔸The State of JS 2025 results are in. Not many surprises — TypeScript is more popular than everything else, Node.js leads on the server, and everyone is using AI tools more;

🔸No AI in Node.js. After a pull request with 19,000 lines where someone clearly burned through a lot of Claude Code tokens, the community started wondering whether it's time to stop allowing this. Here's the petition where you can vote;

🔸Deno appears to be going through some turbulent times, with many reports from people leaving the team, like this one. There have been no official comments about AI replacements or anything similar so far;

Something to Read:

🔸The Platformatic blog examines the reasons and architectural benefits of implementing a virtual file system in Node.js

🔸On the Inngest blog, Aaron Harper talks about their experience using worker threads. Not a silver bullet, but it handles the assigned tasks well.

🔸What's wrong with the Stream API in Node.js — James M Snell published his thoughts on this in the Cloudflare blog

🔸My "favorite" projects — the ones where you need to rewrite an ancient codebase into something modern, current, and if you're lucky, even a bit hipster. In his blog, the ifandelse author shares practical experience rewriting a 12-year-old legacy JavaScript library into modern TypeScript.

🔸Blindly increasing work_mem when working with PostgreSQL is a bad idea. Why? The answer is in this article.

🔸On one hand, we fight AI slop; on the other, we want to write like Matteo Collina. In his blog, he published skills for Claude Code that will make you a Node.js genius. Not really, but it's worth trying.

🔸Do you know how to proxy requests? Here's a short guide on how to do it across different platforms

🔸Why are there so many memes about node_modules? Obviously because of their size. But why is that folder always so huge? Here are some details

🔸Just an interesting study showing that while we tell people in interviews that blocking the main thread in Node.js is bad, many people actually do it.

🔸And here's a bit of hardcore — a comparison of compression algorithms. Not for everyone, but definitely relevant for some.

🔸A bit about partitioning in databases — always useful to brush up on.

🔸Everything's a date, and we're just months and weeks in it. Well, if we're talking about JavaScript. But seriously, here's a good explanation of why you need to be careful with dates in JS

🔸Engineers at Bloomberg are trying to bring order to Source Maps — some details on why and what this means for us in their blog.

🔸That awkward moment when Rust performed worse than TypeScript — wait, what happened?

🔸Vector search is becoming increasingly relevant for us in the age of AI taking over the world.

Something to Watch:

The rise and fall of the famo.us framework

We already mentioned this article earlier, but now here's a review from Theo Browne

A provocative video from Mehul Mohan about why you shouldn't use Node.js, which quickly got a response — but that's on the author's channel if you're interested