I'm so bummed about this. Deno is by far my favourite JS runtime. I could sense this coming for a while now, but I was hopeful and just waiting to see what happened. Here we are. I'm glad I don't need to get off the runtime immediately. Sad we won't see any innovation like we did in the last 8 years or so.

I hope workerd at least adopts Deno's security mechanisms so it functions as a better sandbox.

One of my favourite projects of 2026 was a configurable LLM harness built around using deno as the runtime. The idea is that the configuration builds a state machine-driven program which is bundled into a binary that can only provide access to the I/O your code explicitly needs. I used it primarily to build interactive programs for colleagues which allow some LLM magic to occur without needing to worry about what they would do with Claude Desktop handling the same data or accessing the same machines and so on. It also allowed for testing local LLMs in deterministic patterns. How do they reason about what to do next when they can evaluate the possible states they can enter, based on the current context? It was really fun. Now I don't really know how I'd rebuild it, knowing I wouldn't use Deno. Maybe that's worth learning anyway.