HOW TO USE THIS NOTE
The human whose name is written in this note shall cease to function.
This will not take effect unless the writer has the person's face in mind when writing their name.
Therefore, people sharing the same name will not be affected.
This will not take effect unless the writer has the person's face in mind when writing their name.
Therefore, people sharing the same name will not be affected.
01
Parse
Facebook acquired it, ignored it, then executed it. 600,000 apps orphaned overnight. The shutdown notice gave developers 1 year to migrate or perish.
"We have a difficult announcement to make..."
02
Google Reader
Google decided the world had stopped reading. 38 million users disagreed. Google did not care. RSS never fully recovered.
"We launched Google Reader in 2005... we've decided to retire it."
03
Heroku Free Tier
Salesforce bought the soul of a generation of developers and then sold it for nothing. Every hobby project, every demo, every portfolio — offline at midnight.
"We will be phasing out our free product plans."
04
left-pad
11 lines of JavaScript. One angry developer. The entire internet on its knees for hours. npm unpublished a package and broke the world. Never forgotten.
"I have just un-published left-pad from npm."
05
Adobe Flash
Steve Jobs wrote the obituary in 2010. It took 10 years for the body to stop twitching. A generation of web games, animations, and interactive experiences — gone.
"Adobe will stop distributing and updating Flash Player after December 31, 2020."
06
Internet Explorer
It refused to die for 27 years. It held the web hostage. It made developers weep. Microsoft finally pulled the plug. Millions of CSS hacks became immediately useless.
"Internet Explorer 11 has retired."
07
GitHub Atom
Microsoft bought GitHub. Microsoft makes VSCode. Atom never had a chance. A beloved editor, abandoned by its parent the moment a more profitable child existed.
"We are archiving Atom and all projects under the Atom organization."
08
Twitter API Free Tier
Elon set the price to $100/month. Overnight. No warning. Thousands of bots, tools, and indie projects ceased to function before breakfast.
"Starting February 9, the Twitter API will no longer be free."
09
Google Stadia
Google built a cloud gaming platform. Google killed a cloud gaming platform. As Google does. Developers who bet their studios on it learned an old lesson.
"We're announcing the wind down of our Stadia streaming service."
10
Bower
npm ate it alive. It lasted longer than it deserved. Every `bower_components` folder is a time capsule of a simpler, more chaotic era of front-end development.
"...psst! While Bower is maintained, we recommend using Yarn and Webpack."
11
CoffeeScript
ES6 stole everything it had. Arrow functions, destructuring, template literals — JavaScript became CoffeeScript. The original had no reason left to exist.
"CoffeeScript has always just been JavaScript."
12
Firebase Dynamic Links
Google deprecated its own deep linking product with 6 months notice. Every app that used it had to rebuild. Google called it 'simplifying the product portfolio.'
"Firebase Dynamic Links is deprecated and will be shut down on August 25, 2025."
13
Caveman MCP
Before the Model Context Protocol was standardized, every team reinvented the wheel — custom JSON schemas, bespoke tool registries, hand-rolled context windows. Then Anthropic published the spec and the whole ecosystem converged overnight. The caveman era of AI tool-calling is dead. Good riddance.
"Just pass the context as a string, it'll be fine."
Your codebase has its own Death Note.
Ganglia's
Find your dead code → code_dead tool finds every function with no callers — unreachable code that should have been deleted years ago.