{
  "id": 16916789,
  "title": "Revenant: I held a séance for a dead Python library, and it came back passing its tests",
  "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/10/28/revenant-i-held-a-seance-for-a-dead-python-library-and-it-came-back",
  "topic": "tech",
  "section": "Tech",
  "published": "2026-10-28T15:23:26.000Z",
  "source": {
    "name": "Dev.to",
    "slug": "dev-to",
    "url": "https://dev.to/bladeharper_ec7070d6e28be/revenant-i-held-a-seance-for-a-dead-python-library-and-it-came-back-passing-its-tests-43md"
  },
  "original_language": "en",
  "account": "Revenant is a tool that brings abandoned open-source projects back to life. It does this by gathering the project's entire history, including commits, issues, PRs, comments, reviews, and docs, into a searchable memory. Users can then ask the project questions, and Revenant answers in the first person, citing its own records. If the records have no information on a certain topic, the ghost will say, \"The spirits are silent.\"\n\nRevenant then runs the project's own tests in a sandbox environment, writing a death certificate naming what killed it. It then attempts to fix the project one small, verified edit at a time, with each edit judged by the project's own test suite. In the case of the first patient, psf/requests-html, the project had not been updated since February 2019 and failed all tests on Python 3.9–3.13. However, Revenant resurrected it, bringing it to 30/30 passing tests on all Python versions from 3.9–3.13. The project is available at revenant-zaq3.onrender.com.",
  "summary": "This is a submission for the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 4: Ghost in the Machine TL;DR: Revenant holds a séance for abandoned open-source projects. It turns a dead repo's history into a memory you can question, so the project answers in the first person with every sentence cited. Then it runs an autopsy in a sandbox and brings the project back one test-checked edit at a time. Its…",
  "key_points": [
    "Revenant resurrects abandoned open-source projects",
    "psf/requests-html project was inactive since 2019",
    "Revenant restores 30/30 tests across Python 3.9-3.13"
  ],
  "editors_take": null,
  "illustration": null,
  "coverage": {
    "outlets": 1,
    "also_reported_by": []
  },
  "ai_generated": true,
  "disclaimer": "Summaries, key points and the editor’s take are written by software from other outlets’ reporting and may contain errors — always check the linked original."
}