I Got Mad at an npm Hack, Spent 3 Days Yelling at an AI, and Accidentally Built a Library 4 Faster Than Axios

So. The axios hack. If you missed it quick recap, a week ago, the maintainer’s account got compromised. Hackers slipped in a postinstall script that quietly reached into machines and siphoned cloud credentials, API keys, and crypto wallets. The kind of breach that makes you stare at your node_modules folder with profound suspicion. Now, I’m sitting there reading the incident report and something itches at the back of my brain. Why does axios - a client-side HTTP library have any dependencies at all? I went digging. And yeah. I was right. Axios ships with a non-trivial dependency tree, a postinstall surface, and ~14KB of gzipped bundle weight. For something that fundamentally just wraps fetch and http. That’s not a library. That’s a small town. So I did what any reasonable developer does when they’re mildly annoyed at 11pm: I opened a new project folder and decided to fix it myself. Day 1: “How Hard Can It Be” (Famous last words. All great disasters start with these four words.) I fired