This is a submission for the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 1: Touch Grass
My screen time is embarrassing, and I know I'm not alone. Every outdoor app I tried made it worse: you go outside to escape the screen, and then the app keeps you on the screen — scrolling maps, liking photos, reading reviews of the park you're already standing in.
Week 1's theme asks for builds where the screen is the shortest part of the experience. So I built the opposite of a nature app: an app whose entire job is to make you close the tab.
Live demo: https://nikankh.iceiy.com/touchgrass/ TouchGrass is a tiny web app that turns your free time into a real outdoor micro-adventure. You pick your city, how much time you have (15 minutes to 2 hours), a vibe (walk / run / chill / play / explore), and your crew (solo / friends / family / dog). Then an AI designs a structured mission for you: a title, concrete steps, things to spot on the way, a short packing list, and one surprise twist.
The flow is deliberately short:
That's the whole session. The best mission is the one you never finish reading because you're already outside.
Every mission is generated live by GPT-OSS 20B — a fully open-weight model — reached straight from the browser through Pollinations' free anonymous tier. There is no backend, no API key, no account, no billing. The app is four static files (HTML + CSS + vanilla JS) that I host on plain shared hosting.
Why that matters for this project, concretely:
Open innovation isn't a slogan here; it's what makes a no-budget, no-login, no-backend app possible at all. A closed model would have killed this project on day one.
The prompt engineers the model into a strict JSON mission shape — if the model ever returns anything sloppy, a parser validates it and a local fallback bank of hand-written missions keeps the app alive so the button never lies to you. Streaks and field logs live in localStorage, so your outdoor history is yours and only yours. One fetch call, no frameworks, no build step, 36 KB total.
I built TouchGrass to get myself outside more — the mission cards and field log above are from testing the generator, and my first real field entry is next. The app is ready when I am.
Built for Hacktoberfest 2026, Week 1: Touch Grass.