Zero Dependency 2026 — Build Real Software With No Packages. Prove It.

Half your code is now written by an AI that hallucinates the other half's package names. That's not a joke. Across 576,000 samples, 19.7% of the packages AI coding models suggested didn't exist — and attackers have started pre-registering those exact hallucinated names, waiting for someone to npm install a package that was never real to begin with. Meanwhile, public registries catalogued 454,600 new malicious packages in 2025 alone, pushing the cumulative total past 1.2 million. A modern web app now pulls in 1,200+ dependencies once you count the full transitive tree — for software that, ten years ago, would have shipped with a fraction of that. That's precisely what Zero Dependency 2026 is about. Organized by Hackathon Raptors , Zero Dependency is a 72-hour online global hackathon where participants build genuinely useful software — CLIs, parsers, servers, databases, security tools — using nothing but their programming language's standard library. No frameworks. No packages. No supply chain to inherit. Just your language and your engineering skill. Why Zero Dependency? Modern AI coding assistants can generate code fast, and they reach for a dependency by reflex — sometimes one that doesn't exist. But real engineering isn't judged by how many packages you imported. It's judged by questions like: Do you actually understand what the library you'd normally import is doing underneath? Can you build the thing yourself, correctly, from primitives? Does your code handle the edge cases a package would've handled for you? Is the implementation idiomatic, or a fight against the standard library? Could a judge verify your dependency manifest is empty in five seconds? Zero Dependency is designed around these questions. Instead of rewarding whoever pulls in the most packages the fastest, the hackathon rewards teams who can prove they didn't need to. About the Hackathon 🌍 Global Online Hackathon ⏳ 72 Hours 💰 $1,800 Prize Pool 👥 Solo or Teams of up to 4 🎓 Open to students, profess