grave: I Gave Every Dead Process on My Machine an Epitaph

A developer built grave, a 99-line C++ wrapper that forks and execs a command, captures its exit status, killing signal, peak memory and last stderr lines via wait4, and, when the process dies abnormally, has a local Gemma model (gemma3:4b via Ollama) write a three-sentence epitaph from those facts alone. Epitaphs are stored separately from the fact sheet in ~/.graveyard so a hallucinated epitaph is never quoted back as fact, and a 'seance' command lets the most recent dead process answer questions only from its own record. The author notes the 4B model can still embellish, that stderr is fed directly into the prompt so a hostile program could inject instructions, and that running open-weight locally keeps sensitive crash data offline and free.

This is a submission for the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 4: Ghost in the Machine https://dev.to/challenges/hacktoberfest-week4-2026-10-26 Programs die on my machine constantly and nobody notices. A segfault scrolls off the screen. A kill goes through. The only record is a number in $? that I will never look at again. So I built grave , a small wrapper that treats those deaths as worth remembering. grave ./myprogram If the program exits cleanly, grave says nothing. If it dies, a local Gemma model writes its epitaph using only the facts of its death. Then you can hold a séance: grave seance "who killed you?" The most recent ghost answers from its own record. If the record doesn't say, it's supposed to admit it doesn't remember. It's 99 lines of C++ and does one thing. VIDEO LINK HERE The video is recorded with the Wi-Fi off. First a segfault, then the séance: $ ./grave ./crash OUTPUT 1 HERE $ ./grave seance "who killed you?" OUTPUT 2 HERE REPO URL HERE The wrapper forks and execs your command, pipes its stderr to keep its last words, and calls wait4 for the exit status, the killing signal, and peak memory. A clean exit is silent. Anything else becomes a fact sheet: name, seconds alive, exit code or signal, peak memory, last words. The fact sheet goes to Gemma gemma3:4b through Ollama with one rule: Write a 3 sentence epitaph for a dead process. Use ONLY these facts. Do not invent a cause of death or any detail not listed. One design decision came from testing. My first version stored the epitaphs in the same file the séance reads. That means a hallucinated epitaph would later be quoted back as fact. So the graveyard ~/.graveyard holds facts only, epitaphs live in a separate file, and the séance only ever sees the facts of the most recent death. Limits. A 4B model can still embellish no matter what the prompt says. That's why the raw facts sit next to every epitaph: you can always check what the model was told against what it wrote. grave also only sees what it launches, not every death on the system. And a process's stderr goes straight into the prompt, so a hostile program could write instructions into its own last words. The exit status prints first and the epitaph follows, because the model takes a few seconds on a laptop. A dead process's last words are rarely harmless. They carry file paths, usernames, hostnames, and half a stack trace. I wasn't willing to send that to a server I don't control just to get a sad sentence back. With an open-weight model, the demo runs with the Wi-Fi off, which the video shows. Nothing leaves the machine, and it costs nothing per death. Swapping models is one environment variable, GRAVE MODEL , so when a better small model ships, nothing in the code changes. A closed API could write the same epitaph. It couldn't do it offline, privately, and for free. The first thing I buried was a program I wrote to crash on purpose. It allocated 50 MB, touched every page, then dereferenced a null pointer. I knew exactly how it would die, and I still read the epitaph like it was news. This is what came back: EPITAPH HERE Then I asked the dead process who killed it. It could only answer from its record, and the record says one thing: signal 11, a segmentation fault. No murderer, just a pointer that pointed nowhere. That's what stuck with me. Every crash I've ever had was this specific and this unremarkable, and I scrolled past all of them. Something should at least say a few words. Best Use of Gemma