bombshell

2025 was a foundational year for Bombshell, with critical structural work behind the scenes. We begin 2026 in an incredibly strong position.

• The Bombshell organization has been formed to steward our open source projects, adopting an open governance.
• Clack v1.0 was just released. The clack repo has 7.3K+ stars and @clack/prompts has 3.8M weekly downloads on NPM.
• Tab is now available. It has already been adopted by projects like Cloudflare, Nuxt, and Vitest.
• We have our new docs up and running, which provide a solid foundation for the work moving forward.
• Our Discord community is starting to come alive.

As we look ahead into 2026, I wanted to share some insight into our priorities.

Clack

Clack is already the de facto prompt library of the JS ecosystem. In 2026, we plan to treat it like the essential infrastructure it is.

• Focus on stability and long-term compatibility over novelty
• Continue to drive ecosystem adoption, in collaboration with e18e
• Improve our triage process to bring our issue and PR counts down significantly
• Adopt a regular and sustainable minor release cadence
• Fix known edge cases around incremental rendering, wrapping, and resize behaviors
• Expose better APIs for custom theming, concurrent tasks, and async search

New Rendering Engine (TBD)

Clack is currently constrained by layout edge cases that have proven extremely difficult to fix with our current architecture. Looking forward, we’re exploring a new rendering engine that can support increasingly complex layouts for everything from prompts to full TUIs.

While our exact plans are still taking shape, we know this primitive is a missing piece that unlocks the next phase of Bombshell’s vision. When it’s ready to power a future version of Clack, we’ll adopt it with minimal disruption to existing APIs, where possible.

So far, we expect this library to support:

• Predictable, high-throughput performance under streaming workloads
• Familiar layout constraints that build on CSS flex and grid models via Taffy. Going all-in on Rust or using napi-rs bindings is still TBD.
• Streaming-aware rendering that can interleave third-party output without breaking existing styles
• Responsive reflowing without relying on altscreen

Clink

Clack, Args and Tab are the beginning of an ecosystem of composable CLI libraries that each solve a single problem really well. Together, they’re starting to compose into something the JavaScript ecosystem is currently missing: a cohesive toolchain for CLIs and TUIs that emphasizes ergonomics, performance, and explicit composition.

Clink will be the connective tissue that links all Bombshell libraries together—it will provide conventions and shared plumbing for easily writing self-contained executables in JavaScript, building on Node’s SEA support.

Documentation

Documentation is the backbone of the strongest open source communities. We’ve done the foundational work to put our docs in position for this next phase, but there’s a lot of work remaining to reach our goals. By the end of 2026, our docs will help make Bombshell software legible, predictable, and easy to reason about regardless of experience level.

This year, we’re going to build out a docs team where humans write for other humans. Together we’ll:

• Expand our reference content to cover 100% of our API surfaces
• Introduce guides to improve the onboarding experience
• Introduce recipes for advanced use cases and complex patterns
• Create great contributing guidelines across our entire organization
• Invest in localization efforts with Lunaria

Community and Governance

Our governance doc includes a section on the Request For Discussion (RFD) process. If you’ve never seen Oxide’s RFD site, we can’t recommend it enough—it’s a huge inspiration.

For us, the RFD process currently exists in name only, so we’ll be investing a lot in building this up from scratch. Our goal is that all meaningful technical decisions happen through RFDs by default—not in backchannels on Discord. Decentralized, global communities require async communication, open conversations, and solid decision records. This doesn’t mean every idea will need an RFD—but decisions that affect APIs, behavior, or long-term direction should.

On a similar note, we’re currently finalizing our Open Collective page so we can begin accepting community and company donations. Your financial support will give us the time and resources to build an open source community intentionally with a focus on long-term sustainability. We expect this to go live in early February 2026.

Onward!

If you’re excited about the vision we’ve laid out for 2026, please don’t hesitate to get in touch via Discord, Bluesky, or email.

The fuse has been lit—let’s build.