# I Built a Graveyard for My Abandoned Git Repos (Gemma Writes the Epitaphs, Offline)

> Source: <https://dev.to/anushdeotare11/i-built-a-graveyard-for-my-abandoned-git-repos-gemma-writes-the-epitaphs-offline-47kf>
> Published: 2026-10-30 20:39:19+00:00

*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)*

Every developer has a graveyard. Mine is a folder of projects that started with a burst of commits and a confident README, then stopped. Nobody announced it. The last commit just sat there, and the project quietly died.

**Repo Graveyard** points at a folder of git repositories and turns the abandoned ones into a night-time graveyard. Each dead project gets a tombstone with its birth and death years, a cause of death, an epitaph, and a short ghost story told in the project's own voice. It scans, it mourns, and it can try to bring something back.

For the theme, I read "Ghost in the Machine" literally. Every abandoned repo is a ghost: code that still exists, still has a history, and has no one left to talk to. The git log is the only thing left of it, so the log is what the ghost speaks from.

A few things it does:

`wip` or `fix later`. "Died young" for under 10 commits. "Death by TODO" for repos buried in unfinished notes. "Sudden death" for heavy activity followed by silence. "Fizzled out" for everything else.
**"Ghost in the Machine" Hackathon Project**

A 100% local, air-gapped forensic inspection tool that scans your folders for abandoned Git repositories and resurrects them into an atmospheric, dark-humored virtual graveyard.

```
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
|  🕯️  REPO GRAVEYARD                 [100% Local & Private] [🟢 Gemma 3:4b Ready]  |
|  Where dead code rests, unresolved TODOs haunt, and local spirits speak.          |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
|  [ C:\Projects                            ]  [ Scan Projects ]  [ 🔮 Séance ]    |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
|  🌱 Still Among the Living (Recent commits detected)                             |
|  [● spectral-cli  4d ago]  [● pixel-roguelike-core  75d ago]                      |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
|  ⚰️ The Cemetery Grounds                                                          |
|                                                                                   |
|    +-------------------+    +-------------------+    +-------------------+        |
|   /       R.I.P.        \   |      R.I.P.       |   ✝       R.I.P.        |       |
|  |   neural-toaster      |  | crypto-tamagotchi |  | vim-exit-simulator   |       |
|  |    2021 — 2022        |  |    2022 — 2023    |  |    2023 — 2023        |       |
```

…
Run it with Python and Ollama. The README has the setup steps: install Ollama, `ollama pull gemma3:4b`, then `python run.py`.

**The model:** Gemma 3 4B (`gemma3:4b`), running locally through Ollama. I built this on a laptop with an RTX 3050 and 4 GB of VRAM, so a small model that runs without a datacenter was the point.

**The stack:** Python and FastAPI on the backend, and a vanilla HTML/CSS/JS frontend with no frameworks, no CDN and no external fonts. The only network call in the whole app is to `localhost:11434`, where Ollama lives. Scan results and generated text are cached as JSON, so the graveyard loads instantly the second time.

**The main design decision: the model doesn't know anything. Git does.**

I didn't want an LLM guessing what happened to my projects, so I split the work:

Epitaphs are generated in a background queue after each scan, while ghost stories and Resurrect plans stream token by token over server-sent events. On my machine the first token of a warm ghost story shows up in about 1.3 seconds.

The Resurrect plan only sees three inputs: the README's first lines, the TODO lines, and the last five commit messages. It never sees the source code.

A tool that reads your commit history is reading something private. Commit messages, TODOs, the names of side projects you never told anyone about, the half-finished idea from 2 a.m.: it's a fairly intimate record of what you worked on and what you gave up on.

That's why this had to be open and local:

**Best Use of Gemma**: the whole project runs on `gemma3:4b` locally through Ollama, as the voice that gives each abandoned repo its epitaph, ghost story and revival plan, while git supplies every fact.