Séance — Ghost in the Machine

A developer built Séance, an offline chatbot that uses the open-weight Gemma model via Ollama to role-play the "spirits" of seven dead programming languages including COBOL, FORTRAN, ALGOL, LISP, Smalltalk, Ada and Prolog. The tool runs without internet access, logs sessions locally to JSONL for durability, and optionally adds MongoDB Atlas vector memory, Sentry tracing, SerpApi search and ElevenLabs text-to-speech. It was submitted to the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 4.

Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 4: Ghost in the Machine Submission 🕯️ This is a submission for the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 4: Ghost in the Machine What I Built Séance — an offline séance chatbot that channels the spirits of dead programming languages COBOL, FORTRAN, ALGOL, LISP, Smalltalk, Ada, Prolog through Gemma, a local open-weight model. It works with the lights and the internet off, and every séance stays on your machine — nothing is uploaded to a server you don't control. Repo: mahilsaily306-max/seance Demo Deployed frontend: link goes here — render / digitalocean / .tech domain Demo video: link goes here Core flows, one click each: Conjure a spirit → pick COBOL, FORTRAN, LISP, or any of the seven dead languages and ask it questions One-shot conjure → node src/seance.js --spirit COBOL --ask "What is a paragraph?" Interactive séance → chat mode with past-séance history replay History → replay previous turns for a summoned spirit Voice → ElevenLabs TTS reads the spirit's whisper aloud optional Code mahilsaily306-max/seance Key files: src/seance.js — CLI séance: conjure spirits, chat, log turns, replay history src/spirits.js — the seven dead-language spirits, each with era, epitaph, style, last words src/model.js — Gemma local client Ollama / Hugging Face / offline echo fallback src/memory.js — MongoDB Atlas vector memory with Tiger Data / pgvector fallback src/tracing.js — Sentry agent tracing latency, source, errors src/search.js — SerpApi live web search for historical language facts optional src/voice.js — ElevenLabs TTS for spirit whispers optional src/session.js — Durable Temporal-style sessions logged to JSONL scripts/setup.js — one-time dependency setup docker-compose.yml — local MongoDB stack for offline memory How I Built It Open-source AI at every layer: Runtime: Gemma open-weight via Ollama; falls back to a deterministic offline echo so the séance runs with zero ML installs and zero internet. Memory: JSONL local log Temporal-style durability so séances survive restarts; optionally MongoDB Atlas vector memory or Tiger Data/pgvector hybrid search over past turns. Tracing: Sentry captures agent setup, latency, tokens, cost, and errors — set SENTRY DSN and every turn is traced. Search: SerpApi grounds answers in fresh web results when you want historical language context. Voice: ElevenLabs TTS gives the spirits a voice; the séance works silently without it. CI: npm test exercises every module; works with no dependencies installed. Why Does Open Innovation Matter? Running open-weight models locally means: No internet needed. Gemma runs on a laptop offline after download. A closed API agent would stop working without connectivity. Data stays on your machine. Your séance logs, questions, and answers are never uploaded to a server you don't control. Set up once, never pay again. Open-weight models cost $0 to run locally — no per-token charges, no subscriptions. Swap models freely. Swap Gemma for Mistral, Llama, or any open weight. Closed APIs lock you into one vendor. The open-based approach worked better here because this is a personal, offline-first tool — privacy, offline use, and zero recurring cost matter more than a hosted SaaS. My Agent Session Saved with DevRelay and embedded below Entire prize category: share the agent sessions behind your project . agent session embed link goes here The Spooky Payoff Before Séance, dead programming languages were just forgotten syntax in dusty manuals — COBOL, FORTRAN, LISP, Smalltalk, Ada, Prolog, buried by the industry. After: you hold a séance with their spirits, ask them questions, hear their era-appropriate answers — all offline, all open, all on your own hardware. The ghosts are back, and they answer for $0. Prize Categories Entering every applicable partner category: Featured : Gemma, Render, DigitalOcean, Tinker Partner : Mastra, Sentry, Temporal, MongoDB Atlas, SerpApi, Browserbase, ElevenLabs, Auth0, Backboard, Entire, GitHub Copilot, .tech Domains, Tiger Data, TabPFN