This is a submission for the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 1: Touch Grass.
StepOut — The Invisible Mission: AI designs the experience. You put your phone away. Real life becomes the experience.
StepOut is a different kind of AI-powered outdoor experience. Instead of keeping users engaged with another app, it uses AI to give them a reason to leave their screens behind.
The idea is simple: a CAPTCHA you can't solve from your screen.
Users create a personalized physical mission based on their available time, surroundings, preferred experience, energy, and accessibility constraints. StepOut generates a real-world challenge that requires observation, listening, exploration, or reflection rather than interacting with a device.
The experience follows four steps:
StepOut is built for people who want to spend less time scrolling and more time noticing the world around them. It doesn't try to make people addicted to another app; it helps them leave it.
Live Demo: https://stepout-1vha.onrender.com The demo will show the complete journey: creating a personalized mission, receiving the briefing, putting the phone away, returning for an adaptive reflection, and viewing the final Field Report.
GitHub Repository: https://github.com/ankit9241/StepOut Built with TanStack Start, React 19, TypeScript, Tailwind CSS, and an open-weight Gemma model served through Ollama.
StepOut is built around Gemma, an open-weight model from Google, with Ollama providing the model-serving interface.
Rather than using AI as a decorative chatbot, the project uses it for specific tasks throughout the experience:
The interface follows an editorial field-journal aesthetic rather than a conventional gamified productivity dashboard. It uses Instrument Serif and Geist typography, a warm cream background (#F7F4EC), and a restrained burnt-vermilion accent (#C84B31).
I also built explicit guardrails into the mission-generation process. A challenge should fit the user's real circumstances, remain accessible and safe, and never require them to keep looking at their phone to complete it.
Engineering verification: The latest implementation passed TypeScript checks, linting, production builds, and all 36 automated tests across six test suites.
StepOut's purpose would be undermined if escaping screens required dependence on a closed, opaque AI service.
Using open-weight Gemma through Ollama makes the AI layer more inspectable, gives developers flexibility over model serving, and creates a path toward running inference locally for greater privacy and control. Open innovation also makes the project's underlying approach reproducible. Developers can examine the prompts, experiment with different models, improve the fallback mechanisms, and contribute better ways of generating safe, meaningful offline experiences.
Most importantly, the model is not the product by itself. The value comes from how the model is integrated into a complete experience that encourages people to disconnect.
StepOut demonstrates that AI doesn't always need to maximize engagement, session length, or screen time. It can be used to help people spend less time with technology and more time in the physical world.
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