Long Term

A warning started showing up in my GitHub Actions workflow. Apparently Node 20 is deprecated.

Migrate by June 2026, it said. I'd shelved it as a future problem. Looked again — next month. Node 20 itself had already hit EOL at the end of last month. By the time I noticed, my CI was running on an unsupported runtime.

Faster than I expected. Released April 2023. Cut in under three years. Long Term Support — the Long isn't that long.

Back when I worked in contract development, Rails upgrades were both a headache and an invoice line item. Every EOL milestone meant patching broken compatibility. If you knew the Rails EOL cycle, you could roughly predict the rhythm of the work.

I don't follow Rails anymore. But Node comes, the OS comes, and I end up in the same place.

I hear similar things from the corporate PC market. Windows 10 went out of support last October, and companies that had planned bulk fleet replacements are redoing the quotes. DRAM has nearly doubled. AI's appetite for HBM is eating into PC DRAM supply, apparently. Still, once support lapses, companies have to buy eventually. EOL corners them into spending.

Something that worked yesterday stops working today. The flip side of technology moving forward.

They say AI made writing code easier. It did. But it can't stop what you wrote from breaking one day. When GitHub's runners drop Node 20, somebody has to go fix the workflow. AI can do the typing. But wrangling the hours and the budget — that's still a human job, for now.

EOL isn't an ending. It's the industry's pulse. Every beat, somebody moves to the next runtime, the next OS.