# I can't ask my old team lead why anymore, so I built a séance > Source: > Published: 2026-10-31 05:06:43+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).* A month ago my team lead left. He was the one who knew why our code is shaped the way it is: why one piece is split from another, why a check lives here and not there, why a decision that looks wrong was actually right. More than once since then I have hit one of those decisions, opened a chat to ask him, and stopped halfway through typing. He has moved on. It felt wrong to pull him back into code he no longer owns, and there was nobody else to ask. `git blame` did not help. It showed me the last person who touched the file, not the person who decided why it exists. That is when it hit me how much a team loses when one person walks out the door, and how little of what they knew was ever written down where the next person would find it. Halloween is about talking to people who are no longer in the room. So I built a séance for them. **TL;DR** **Ouija Blame** asks a line of code why it exists. It walks the line back to the commit that **first wrote it**, gathers what its author and reviewers wrote (commits, the pull request, review comments, linked issues, and the prompts behind agent-written code), and the **ghost answers only in their own words**, each one linked. If nobody ever wrote the reason down, the ghost says **"I never wrote down why."** **Gemma can only point, then explain with citations.** The open model picks passage *numbers* from a fixed list, so it cannot put a word in the ghost's mouth, and code checks every quote word for word. Then it writes a plain-words answer (what the line does, why it exists, what to check before you change it) where every reason cites a quote by number. **The test:** 45 real lines from Rails, Kubernetes, Home Assistant, Ansible and Istio that someone deleted as pointless, which broke something and were put back. Every method saw only history from before the deletion. The séance surfaced a written reason for **28/45** lines; the `git blame` message, **19/45** (+20 points, 95% CI +9 to +33). Reading the whole PR behind the blame commit found **29/45**, but meant reading **268 words** per line instead of **67**. **What surprised me:** no method, mine included, found the reason the line *had to come back* more than 18% of the time. The reason code was written and the reason it must stay are usually different, and the second one is almost never written down. **What failed:** Gemma 4B hates silence. It said "I never wrote down why" for only 1 of the 13 lines where no method found any reason. **[Ouija Blame](https://ouija-blame.onrender.com)** is a pixel-art séance for one question: *why does this line exist?* It is a séance for people's lost knowledge in a repo, not a haunted terminal. `git log -L` follows the line back through every change to the commit that first wrote it. `git blame` stops at the last change, which in my test set was the wrong commit In that Kubernetes example, `git blame` on `cluster/addons/storage-class/openstack/default.yaml` shows a group-version bump by a different person. The ghost is **@jsafrane**, who wrote the file in 2016, and the answer comes from his PR: *"In previous versions of Kubernetes a PersistentVolumeClaim without a StorageClass annotation on these cloud platforms would be satisfied by manually-created PersistentVolume objects…"* Six years later someone deleted it as an OpenStack leftover, and existing Cinder volumes became Code written with an AI agent has a new kind of lost knowledge: the prompt. The engineer typed the reason into a chat, and the commit says "Canvas rce2". [Entire](https://github.com/entireio/cli) records those sessions and publishes them next to the code as `refs/entire/checkpoints/…`. Ouija Blame reads them with plain git (no account needed), so the ghost can quote the human's own prompt: **Ask a line of code why it exists. The ghost of whoever wrote it answers, only in words they actually wrote.** Live: [https://ouija-blame.onrender.com](https://ouija-blame.onrender.com) · DEV Hacktoberfest 2026, Week 4: Ghost in the Machine Every codebase has a line nobody dares delete, and the person who knew why it is there has left. `git blame` shows the last commit that touched the line, which is often a reformat. Ouija Blame walks the line back to the commit that first wrote it, gathers what its author and reviewers wrote (commit messages, the pull request, review comments, linked issues, and agent-session prompts recorded with Entire), and lets an open-weight model, Gemma, point at the passages that say why. The model can only choose passage numbers, never write the quote, and code checks every quote word for word against its source. If nothing says why, the ghost says **"I never wrote down**… ``` line ──git log -L──▶ every commit that touched it ──▶ PRs · reviews · linked issues · Entire prompts │ passages: exact slices of the raw text (templates, bots, /lgtm dropped) │ BM25 against the line's own words → top 16 ▼ Gemma 3 4B (Ollama): "which passages say WHY?" → ids from an enum │ quote checker: word for word in the source, or dropped ▼ the ghost speaks, or "I never wrote down why." ``` `enum`, so Gemma can only choose from what is there, and every chosen passage is checked against its source again before it is shown. Over the 45 test séances the checker dropped `api.github.com`; the server asks the medium. The same `seance.run()` serves the evaluation from a disk cache. The hardest part of "why does this line exist?" is knowing the right answer. Big projects have a natural answer key: **reverts of deletions.** Someone removes code that looks pointless, it breaks something, and a revert puts it back, usually with a PR explaining why it was needed. `git log -S` hits for the line's main identifier; the séance. | Method | Gives the revert's reason | Gives a written reason (any) | Words to read (median) | |---|---|---|---| | `git blame` message | 7/45 (16%) | 19/45 (42%) | 12 | | blame + its whole PR | 7/45 (16%) | 29/45 (64%) | 268 | | `git log -S` , 5 oldest | 5/45 (11%) | 15/45 (33%) | 41 | | **séance** | **8/45 (18%)** | **28/45 (62%)** | **67** | Paired bootstrap over cases, séance minus baseline, any written reason: vs blame **+0.20 (+0.09 to +0.33)**, vs `log -S` **+0.29 (+0.13 to +0.44)**, vs blame + PR **−0.02 (−0.11 to +0.04)**. On the revert's reason the differences are all within ±0.09 and not significant. So the honest summary: **the séance finds a written reason far more often than blame, about as often as reading the entire PR, in a quarter of the reading**, and it reaches the original author every time. Every number above comes from `python -I scripts/stats.py`, which reads only files in [`results/`](https://github.com/Tanay3484/ouija-blame/tree/main/results). The first real user was me. I opened a haunted line from the gallery, read through the séance, and my honest reaction was: *"all I see is a git blame."* The quotes were all there, but nothing told me in plain words the one thing I had come for. That sentence changed the product the same night: every séance now opens with an answer card (what the line does, why it exists, what to check before you change it), and every reason on it is pinned to the quote it came from, so you can check the medium against the ghost. The ghosts in the gallery are real people who wrote real code, and most of them simply moved on to other work. Nobody here is framed as dead, the ghost is a generic sprite rather than anyone's photo, and every word it says links to where that person actually wrote it. That last rule turned out to be the whole product: a tool that only lets people speak in their own recorded words is a tool that makes you notice how rarely we write down *why*. This week I was buried in work until the last night, so most of the code was written by Claude Code from specs we agreed on (`specs/` in the repo). I chose the idea, the cuts and the evaluation design, and I was its first user. `render.yaml`. The AI runtime is on Render.` Entire-Checkpoint` trailer, Ouija Blame reads the published checkpoint and the ghost quotes the developer's own prompt (see the agent-written séance in the gallery).