# The Nine Levels of JavaScript Dependency Hell

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.

---

By Andrew Nesbitt (https://nesbitt.io). Markdown version of https://nesbitt.io/2026/01/05/the-nine-levels-of-javascript-dependency-hell.html