I have walked the circles of JavaScript dependency hell. I watched the developers solve each problem, only to create the next. Come, I will show you what I have seen.
1. Limbo
No package manager. Copy-paste jQuery into your project. Download tarballs. Vendor everything.
Solution: npm makes publishing trivial.
2. Lust
Frictionless publishing. One-line packages, is-odd, left-pad. Why write four lines when you can import?
Solution: Embrace it. Automatic transitive resolution.
3. Gluttony
I put the gluttons in freezing mud, pelted by rain. Here, they drown in node_modules. One import becomes 1,400 packages. Heaviest objects in the universe.
Solution: Better dependency resolution.
4. Wrath
Version conflicts. A needs lodash@3, B needs lodash@4. Resolver errors, build failures.
Solution: Allow multiple versions simultaneously.
5. Greed
The automation treadmill. Ecosystem moves so fast you need bots to keep up. semantic-release to automate publishing, Dependabot and Renovate to automate consuming. Hundreds of PRs per week. Merging without reading. Running to stand still.
Solution: Let tools handle it. Yarn promises better performance and determinism.
6. Heresy
The schisms. Yarn, pnpm, Bun. Four lockfile formats, four CLIs. Community splits, the problems just moved.
Solution: At least everyone still uses the same registry. Centralize trust there.
7. Fraud
I put the flatterers in excrement. npm audit does the same. Security theater screaming about dev dependencies. CVE fatigue. Everyone clicks dismiss.
Solution: Trust the pipeline. Many eyes make bugs shallow.
8. Violence
Worms. Not just trojans but self-propagating attacks through the dependency graph. Compromise one maintainer, spread to thousands of downstream packages automatically. The spice must flow.
Solution: Trusted publishing. OIDC tokens. Let GitHub Actions handle it.
9. Treachery
The machines. AI agents that npm install without reading. LLMs hallucinating package names that don’t exist, until a squatter registers them because Claude keeps asking. Prompt injection in README files. postinstall scripts running unsupervised. The dependency graph isn’t just the attack surface now. It’s the context window.
At the bottom, Satan runs npm install forever. The agents have joined him.