Hacktoberfest 2026: AI belongs to everyone

Major League Hacking (MLH) and DEV are partnering with DigitalOcean to run Hacktoberfest 2026, which will focus on open-source and open-weight AI. The event will include over 300 in-person Fests and a global online event, and will no longer count pull requests, aiming to reduce maintainer burnout and encourage meaningful contributions.

We have some news we're excited to share today: Major League Hacking MLH and DEV are partnering with DigitalOcean to run Hacktoberfest 2026. This October, we’ll host over 300 in-person events “Fests” plus a global online event, all about building with open source and open-weight AI. DEV and MLH have supported Hacktoberfest https://hacktoberfest.com/ for years under DigitalOcean’s ownership. DEV provided a space to share maintainer and contributor learnings, while MLH has powered both in-person and online events. This year will be the first time MLH, DEV, and DigitalOcean are full partners in bringing Hacktoberfest to life. Hacktoberfest started back in 2014 with a simple idea from DigitalOcean: open four pull requests in October, earn a t-shirt. It worked. Thousands of developers made their first open-source contribution during the month-long celebration. For many people reading this, Hacktoberfest was the door that opened open source to them in the first place. It certainly was for a lot of us at MLH. But a good thing can require a refresh. Over the years, that same PR-counting format started to work against the community. Maintainers began to burn out under the volume of low-effort, box-checking pull requests they were receiving. That problem only got worse as AI tools made it trivially easy to generate a PR without generating any real value. The event meant to make maintainers' lives easier started doing the opposite. We didn't want to keep running that version of Hacktoberfest. So we're trying something new. This year, we’re not counting PRs. Hacktoberfest is focused on giving everyone the tools and knowledge to learn, experiment, and build with open artificial intelligence: write your first open-source skills.md, build your own open-source agent, fine-tune an open-weight model, or just follow your curiosity wherever it takes you. We believe open innovation deserves the same priority as proprietary tools for a healthy ecosystem, especially now that AI is part of how most of us build software every day. We're seeing changes to access, pricing, and policy occur overnight, completely out of individual control. Open source AI doesn't eliminate these risks, but it offers transparency and resilience. That's the kind of foundation we want to help you build on. Hacktoberfest 2026 is about meeting you wherever you are in your open-source AI journey, because we believe AI belongs to everyone. To make this a reality, we're working with organizers to host over 300 in-person Fests worldwide. We'll provide the swag, while you get to build with your community. If organizing isn't for you right now, there's still a place for you in this: We look forward to sharing more updates in the coming weeks