DepForecast: A Weather Forecast for the Ghosts in Your node_modules (work in progress)

This is a submission for the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 4: Ghost in the Machine

What I Built

Abandoned dependencies are ghosts in the machine: code whose maintainers are gone but which still runs in production. Developers usually find out only after something breaks or a vulnerability goes unpatched.

DepForecast is a weather forecast for your dependencies. It's a local, open-source CLI that will predict which of a project's npm dependencies are likely to be abandoned in the next 12 months, explain why, and suggest ways to help keep them alive.

Renovate keeps you current. DepForecast tells you when "current" is about to stop existing.

The theme shows up in the output design: 🪦 RESTING for dead packages (with a short, factual obituary), 👻 HAUNTING for at-risk ones, and 🌼 ALIVE for healthy ones. There's also an ofrenda section with ways to help: funding links, "help wanted" issues and contributing guides.

Status: work in progress. I built the data foundation first, because a prediction is only as honest as the data behind it. What's done and tested:

• Collectors for the npm registry and the GitHub GraphQL API, with a disk cache, retries and rate-limit handling
• A leakage guard that blocks any training query from looking at data after its snapshot date
• A real dataset universe: 250 popular JS/TS repos → 5,118 distinct dependencies → 3,719 GitHub repos

The TabPFN predictor, the backtest, the scan command and the Gemma explainer are designed in PLAN.md and are next.

Demo

No deployed link yet, since it's a local CLI. Here's what runs today:

The real dataset

The leakage guard working

Code

How I Built It

Open-source AI (planned core):

• TabPFN-3.5 (open weights, run locally) is the predictor. It's a tabular foundation model that learns in-context from data/train.csv, which suits a small, honest dataset where training a deep model from scratch would overfit. There's a gradient-boosting fallback, so the tool never fails without the weights.
• Gemma (gemma3:4b) via Ollama, run locally, will turn a risk score into a plain-English explanation. Its guardrails: every reason must cite a URL from the evidence (issue titles, README, release notes), and any suggested alternative must exist on npm with a release in the last 12 months. If Ollama is offline, it falls back to rule-based text.

What's built (Python 3.11, Typer, Rich, Pydantic, httpx, pytest):

• Temporal validation, no leakage: train on snapshots at 2024-10-01 and test on 2025-04-01, each with a 12-month outcome window. Even the seed repos' package.json files are read as they were on 2024-10-01, so the population itself doesn't leak the future.
• The label, defined honestly: abandoned = the repo was archived during the window, or it had zero commits and zero npm releases in the whole window. npm's deprecated flag has no timestamp, so it's kept as a column, never as the label.
• Features: commits in the last 3/6/12 months, trend, distinct authors, bus factor (the top author's share of commits), days since last commit and release, issues opened vs. closed, stale PRs, repo age and funding. All are computed strictly from data before the snapshot date.
• Efficient and free: batched GraphQL costs about 1 point per batch of up to 10 repos, and every response is cached on disk, so reruns are free and work offline.
• Monorepos: collapsed to one row per repo (209 of them), and @types/* is excluded.

I built it with an AI coding agent (Claude Code), working in small steps: 22 commits, each with tests.

Why Does Open Innovation Matter?

• Your dependency list is a map of your attack surface. DepForecast runs locally and never sends it to a third-party service.
• It's free to run on every PR, so teams don't ration checks. The whole stack is free: the GitHub API, the npm registry, local TabPFN, local Gemma and GitHub Actions.
• A tool that warns about abandoned software shouldn't itself depend on a service that can disappear. Open weights on your own machine can't be shut down or repriced.
• Verifiable claims: the features, the label definition and the data tables are in the repo. You can inspect them, retrain on your ecosystem and check every number.
• Honest caveat: TabPFN's weights are open but under a non-commercial license, and Gemma follows Google's Gemma terms. Both are documented in THIRD_PARTY.md.

My Agent Session

[Link or embed your DevRelay session here]

The Spirit of It

While testing the collector, I asked GitHub about request, one of the most famous packages in npm history. The answer was quiet: last commit February 11, 2020. Zero commits in the year before my snapshot date, and zero after. It was never archived. The repo is still there and still looks like a living project, but npm now says "request has been deprecated."

That's the ghost: code that looks alive while nobody is home. DepForecast exists so the next request shows up as 👻 HAUNTING in your terminal before it becomes 🪦 RESTING in your production logs. And the ofrenda section is there so developers can do something about it while the maintainers are still around.

Prize Categories

[List the partner categories from the challenge page that apply]