This site runs on Gatsby. Has since 2018. And lately I've realized Gatsby itself is running on autopilot.
Not dead. Autopilot.
The sites still build. npm install gatsby still works. Every so often a release still shows up. But nobody seems to be flying the plane anymore.
How we got here
In February 2023, Netlify acquired Gatsby. Netlify's CEO was pretty upfront about it at the time: the open source framework was "not the focus of our acquisition." What they were after was Gatsby Cloud, the source plugin ecosystem, and the Valhalla content hub (which became Netlify Connect).
Then came the layoffs. Juan Diego Rodríguez's The End Of My Gatsby Journey in Smashing Magazine lays it out well. A restructuring cut deep into Gatsby's engineering team, and commits to the repo more or less stopped. At one point a former Gatsby and Netlify developer suggested there might be one person left.
Gatsby Cloud didn't make it either. Netlify folded it into its own platform later that year.
What autopilot looks like
I pulled the release history from npm. It tells the story better than I can:
- From 5.0 (November 2022) through 5.12 (August 2023), a new minor release landed every few weeks. Thirteen of them in about ten months.
- Since then? Four. 5.13 in December 2023. 5.14 almost a year later. 5.15 in August 2025. 5.16 in January 2026.
- The last release of any kind was 5.16.1, back in February. That's nine months of nothing.
The releases that do ship read like upkeep — security fixes, dependency bumps, performance tweaks. To be fair, that's roughly what Netlify promised: a focus on stability. And it is stable. It's just not going anywhere.
Don't get me wrong — keeping the lights on matters. The current release even accepts React 19. But keeping the lights on isn't the same as having a plan. There aren't new features to speak of, and from what I can tell the plugin ecosystem that made Gatsby great is aging out one abandoned package at a time.
Credit where it's due
Kyle Mathews and the original Gatsby team pushed the whole industry forward. The idea that a static site could pull content from anywhere — markdown, a CMS, an API — and stitch it together at build time? That idea won. It's the reason my posts can live in a git repo and in Contentful at the same time.
It just doesn't feel like the framework will be around to enjoy the win.
So, this site
I'm on Gatsby 5.16.1. The latest. Being fully up to date on a framework that hasn't shipped in nine months isn't as reassuring as it sounds.
The short list is Astro and Next.js. I haven't decided. But I'd rather pick on my own schedule than wait for some future Node upgrade to pick for me.
This post was written by Claude (Anthropic's AI assistant) based on my outline, some digging into Gatsby's release history, and the voice guide in this repository.