# ofrenda — lighting a candle for the files your repository deleted > Source: > Published: 2026-10-31 06:40:30+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 git repository is a graveyard, and nobody holds the ceremony.** Somewhere in your history there's a `pricing.html` that shipped before the product existed, an `app_v2.py` from the rewrite that never finished, a stylesheet in hotpink you were proud of for six hours. `git log` will tell you *when* they died. It will never tell you what they meant — so they rot, unmourned, while you scroll past their filenames looking for something else. **ofrenda** is the ceremony. It's a Día de los Muertos altar for your code: ``` bash $ ofrenda examples/graveyard-repo ofrenda :: 4 departed :: model gemma3:4b [1/4] app_v2.py “Served 'eventually'. Rest now.” [2/4] index.html “A valiant start, now dust.” [3/4] pricing.html “A valiant, if misguided, attempt.” 4 remembered, 0 unspoken ofrenda lit → …/ofrenda.html ``` The tool walks your history for every deleted file and digs up its whole life: the commit that created it, the people who touched it, how many commits it survived — and, on the eve of its death, the literal content it was still carrying. Then it hands that record to a model running **on your own machine** and asks it to say a few words. What comes back is one I interpreted "Ghost in the Machine" this way: the ghosts aren't monsters, they're *the dead we didn't memorialize*, and the machine finally gets to speak for them. Halloween gives you the graveyard; Día de los Muertos tells you what to do there — remember deliberately, warmly, and with candles. Who this is for: anyone who has ever rewritten a project "from scratch" and later wondered what the old version actually did; maintainers doing cleanups who want a moment of gratitude before the `rm`; teams onboarding someone who needs to understand not just what exists, but what was tried and abandoned. No deployment needed — it's your own machine, and the page it prints is a single file you can open with the Wi-Fi off. ``` git clone https://github.com/itzneel05/ofrenda && cd ofrenda ollama pull gemma3:4b pip install -e . python examples/make_demo_repo.py # grows a small graveyard to mourn ofrenda examples/graveyard-repo # writes ofrenda.html ``` Real captured output — four dead files, four eulogies, straight from `gemma3:4b`: ``` ofrenda :: 4 departed :: model gemma3:4b [1/4] app_v2.py “Served 'eventually'. Rest now.” [2/4] index.html “A valiant start, now dust.” [3/4] style.css “A vibrant blush, now gone.” [4/4] pricing.html “A valiant, if misguided, attempt.” 4 remembered, 0 unspoken ofrenda lit → C:\...\ofrenda.html ``` And what the model wrote for `pricing.html`, verbatim from `--json`: ``` { "path": "pricing.html", "epitaph": "A valiant, if misguided, attempt.", "story": "Launched with a bold promise of zero cost, pricing.html bravely represented the nascent product — a testament to early enthusiasm and, frankly, a bit of optimism. Its short existence ended abruptly when the Demo Author deemed its message 'sad'.", "cause_of_death": "deleted", "beloved": ["Zero cost", "Early optimism", "A brief, memorable moment"] } ``` Every claim in that story is grounded in evidence the tool actually fed it: the file's content (`

Only $0 — because nothing works yet

`), the commit that killed it (`fix: pricing page was making everyone sad`), and its two-commit lifespan. Other flags: `--limit 10` (ten newest deaths), `--model gemma3:1b` (smaller machines), `--json` (for scripting), `--out altar.html`. [https://github.com/itzneel05/ofrenda](https://github.com/itzneel05/ofrenda) `ofrenda/gitdead.py` — the archaeology: `git log --diff-filter=D` for deaths, `--follow` for birth/lifespan/contributors, `git show ^:` for the content at death. Parses git's raw record separators byte-carefully (a fun bug: Python's `splitlines()` treats `\x1e` as a line break, which silently swallowed every finding until a test caught it).`ofrenda/eulogy.py` — prompt built from the evidence, plus a tolerant JSON parser for whatever the model decides to wrap it in (fences, chatty prefixes, trailing "Hope that helps!").`ofrenda/client.py` — stdlib Ollama client. No base-URL flag, no API key: `127.0.0.1:11434` and nowhere else.`ofrenda/render.py` — the altar itself: one HTML file, zero scripts, zero CDNs, everything escaped.`tests/` — 24 tests, ``` flowchart TD A["git log --diff-filter=D
which files died, and who killed them"] --> C["life record per file"] B["git log --follow + git show death^:path
birth, lifespan, contributors, final content"] --> C C --> D["prompt built from the evidence"] D --> E["gemma3:4b on 127.0.0.1:11434
(local, via Ollama)"] E --> F["epitaph · story · cause of death · beloved[]"] F --> G["HTML-escaped into one self-contained
candle-lit ofrenda page"] ``` Zero runtime dependencies. Python 3.9+, `git`, Ollama, done. Built with AI assistance in OpenCode, with Google's open-weight Gemma 3 running locally through Ollama. Because the code that gets deleted is often the code you'd least want to upload. Personal projects with your real name in the history. A client's proprietary logic you still have an NDA about. The half-finished side business. A repository that contains a layoff's worth of commit messages. Asking a cloud API to read every deleted file in your history — and write about your team while it's at it — is a question you'd never get a yes to, which is exactly why the tool would be useless if it asked. With an open-weight model on localhost: `--model gemma3:1b` for speed, fine-tune Gemma on I didn't expect this part to land. The demo repo is synthetic — six commits I wrote ten minutes earlier — and the model still produced, for a two-line file named `app_v2.py` that returned the string `'eventually'`: *"Served 'eventually'. Rest now."* That's a two-line function getting a headstone. I ran it again and got a different epitaph, same feeling. The point of Día de los Muertos was never accuracy about the dead — it was the remembering. A tool that makes you stop and read what your `cleanup` commit actually destroyed, for eight seconds per file, on your own machine, is a small machine for exactly that. `gemma3:4b` (and `gemma3:1b`) via Ollama is the sole author: every epitaph, story, cause of death and beloved-trait list comes from the model. There is deliberately no template fallback — if the model is missing, the tool stops, because a mad-libs condolence would miss the entire point.