I Couldn't Remember the Last Time I Did Nothing, So I Built a Sloth to Do It With Me. You just have to do nothing. 🦥

This is a submission for the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 3: Slow and Steady.

What I Built

Be honest with yourself for a second. Can you actually remember the last time you sat back in your chair and did nothing?

I don't mean watching a video while eating lunch. I don't mean listening to a podcast on a walk, or scrolling through your phone on the couch. I mean genuinely sitting back, looking at the ceiling or out a window, with no screen in your hand and no noise in your ears.

If you can't remember, neither could I.

Lately, every tiny two-minute gap in my day gets eaten by my phone. Waiting for a project to build? I grab my phone. Waiting for water to boil? Phone. Lying in bed exhausted at midnight? Still scrolling. We tell ourselves that picking up our phone is "taking a break," but it really isn't. It's just feeding more noise to an already tired brain.

The funny thing is, when we finally try to rest using a meditation or wellness app, those apps make us work too. They give you strict breathing counts (inhale for 4, hold for 7, exhale for 8), tell you how to sit, and track your "mindfulness streak." If you miss a day, the app turns red and makes you feel guilty. If your mind wanders, you feel like you're failing at relaxing.

While thinking about the Slow and Steady theme this week, I started looking into why "doing nothing" feels so hard for us, and why it's so important for our health.

It comes down to one simple truth: rest isn't something you can force. It's something you stop getting in the way of.

Most of us treat relaxation like a transaction: "Okay, I did this breathing exercise for five minutes, why am I not calm yet?!" It's just like trying to force yourself to sleep when you have insomnia. The harder you try and the more you check the clock, the more awake you stay.

Your brain and body already know how to settle down if you just give them space. When you finally put the phone down and stop taking in new information, your brain's natural resting state kicks in. In the background, it starts sorting through your day, letting stress fade out, and connecting random ideas. You don't need another productivity technique. You just need permission to sit back and let your thoughts float by like leaves on a river.

So I built SlothMode, a calm, 100% local laptop app where you cannot fail.

You put your phone down, lean back, and do nothing. While you rest, a sleepy little three-toed sloth named Momo (our own character, though definitely a friendly distant cousin of DEV's sloth mascot, Sloan!) hangs out with you.

Here is how it works:

• No techniques or rules. You don't have to close your eyes, sit still, or count your breaths. Fidgeting, stretching, or staring at the wall are all completely fine.
• Only your phone matters. Your laptop webcam checks once per second for one thing only: are you holding your phone? Leaving your phone face-down on the desk is totally fine.
• No guilt, ever. If you do pick up your phone, nothing turns red. No alarm goes off and you don't lose a streak. The timer just pauses quietly. Momo opens one sleepy eye, lets out a slow yawn, rolls over, and waits for you: "No rush. Momo will wait."
• The Moss Meter. Real sloths move so slowly that green algae grows on their fur. In SlothMode, you rest so slowly that soft green moss grows in patches on Momo. After 20 minutes of rest in a day, a tiny pink flower pops up on his head.
• Rest Moments and Scenes. You don't always have 15 minutes free. On the home screen, you can tap quick buttons for real moments in your day, like "Before a meeting" (2 min), "Want to scroll?" (3 min), "After a hard talk" (5 min), or "Before sleep" (15 min), while Momo rests in a Forest Morning, Rainy Day, Seaside, or Starry Night window.
• Momo's Leaf Book. Have you ever noticed that the second you sit down to rest, your brain suddenly remembers three chores you forgot to do, or comes up with a random project idea? Usually, you grab your phone to write it down and accidentally spend 30 minutes scrolling. In SlothMode, after your rest ends, Momo softly asks: "Did anything float by?" Local Gemma tidies your rough notes into leaves in your Leaf Book (Idea, To-do, or Thought), or lets you click "Let go" because "Some ideas are just nice to have had."

(Note: SlothMode is a rest tool, not medical help.)

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Demo

🎥 Direct link: Slothmode - Its ok to do nothing (YouTube)

A couple of small details I loved building (and that you can spot in the walkthrough above):

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Code

Bin4yi / slothMode

SlothMode

A laptop app for doing nothing, where you can't fail. Rest with Momo the sloth. The webcam checks one thing only: is a phone in your hand?

Built for DEV Hacktoberfest Week 3, "Slow and Steady". The AI at the core is open: MediaPipe for the camera check and Gemma (open weights, via Ollama) for Momo's few words. Both run on your laptop.

What it feels like

• Press Do nothing, or tap a rest moment ("Before a meeting", "Want to scroll?", "Before sleep" and so on). No menus before resting.
• Momo meditates, then sleeps, in a scene with a soft looping sound. Momo picks the scene himself: forest morning, rainy day, seaside sunset or starry night, by time of day and the rest moment. Before sleep always rests under the stars, slightly dimmed.
• Pick up your phone and the timer pauses quietly. Momo yawns and waits: "No rush.…

View on GitHub

🔗 Repository: https://github.com/Bin4yi/slothMode

Licensed under the **MIT License.

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How I Built It

I built SlothMode with Vite, React, and TypeScript. I wanted the whole app to feel like a quiet forest at golden hour, so I used soft greens and warm sand colors (#F4EFE3, #6E9A5B, #2F4A3A, #E7D3B0), rounded Nunito type, and slow 600–1200ms transitions so nothing on screen ever jumps or rushes.

1. A webcam check that moves like a sloth (MediaPipe)

An app about resting shouldn't make your laptop fan spin like a jet engine.

• I used MediaPipe Tasks Vision (EfficientDet-Lite Object Detector and Pose Landmarker) in the browser, slowed down to just 1 frame per second.
• Just detecting a "cell phone" wasn't enough because my phone sits on my desk while I work. So I combined the phone box with the wrist coordinates from the Pose model. It only counts as "phone in hand" if the phone is near your wrist for 3 checks in a row.
• If you get up from your chair to stretch or look out a real window, the app notices nobody is in the frame after 10 seconds and switches to away. The timer keeps running and Momo snacks on a leaf. And if you don't want to turn on your camera at all, there is a "No camera, just a timer" option right on the setup screen.

2. Momo's sleepy voice (Gemma on Ollama)

I used Gemma running locally through Ollama on localhost for four small jobs:

1. The Sloth Guide: Most guided sessions talk way too much. In a 15-minute SlothMode session, one Gemma call at the very beginning pre-generates just 2 or 3 short lines (max 12 words each, like "Nothing to fix right now. Your mind can wander. Momo's does too."). Making them at the start means nothing loads during the quiet part of your break. The browser's speechSynthesis reads them softly at a slow pace.
2. Sloth Thought of the Day: One short line generated once a day on the home screen.
3. Sorting the Leaf Book: When you jot down a thought after resting, Gemma turns it into clean JSON ({ title, type, first_step }) and saves it in IndexedDB. For ideas, it adds one tiny, low-pressure first step.
4. Weekly Look-Back: Once a week, Gemma looks over your leaf titles and points out a simple pattern (like "The week's notes include a thought, a todo list, and an idea for a balcony garden"). It only states facts from your notes and never tries to give life advice.

If someone opens the app without Ollama running, it quietly falls back to 30 pre-written offline lines without throwing any errors.

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Why Does Open Innovation Matter?

To put it simply: nobody wants an app watching them through their webcam if that video goes to the cloud.

If you're leaning back with your eyes closed, or writing down private thoughts that floated into your head while resting, you shouldn't have to wonder if your camera frames or journal entries are sitting on someone else's server.

Running MediaPipe and Gemma on your own laptop solves that completely:

• Frames never leave your computer. The camera check happens in browser memory once a second and the frame is thrown away right after. Nothing is saved or uploaded.
• No subscriptions or paywalls. Many wellness apps ruin the mood by locking sounds or sessions behind a paywall. Because open models run locally on your own hardware, SlothMode costs nothing to run and stays free.
• Works offline. Turning off Wi-Fi is honestly the best way to take a real break. Since Gemma runs on localhost, the whole app works offline.

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The Lazy Payoff

I was juggling two big deadlines this week, which meant I badly needed this app myself. Here is what I noticed from using it and checking the logs:

• Quiet fans: Running MediaPipe at 1 FPS instead of 30 FPS cut the vision CPU load by over 90%, so my laptop stayed completely silent during sessions.
• Real Gemma timings: In my console logs, pre-generating a session's lines with local Gemma took around 1.4s at the start of a break, and tidying a rough note into a Leaf Book entry took about 0.9s.
• Real breaks: Over four days of building and testing, I ended up taking 65+ minutes of actual phone-free rest. Even better, whenever a random "don't forget to fix that bug" thought popped into my head, I knew I could drop it in the Leaf Book after the timer ended, so I didn't reach for my phone once.

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Prize Categories

• Overall Winner ("Slow and Steady"): Instead of automating chores just so we can cram more work into our day, SlothMode rewards actual laziness and protects the quiet downtime our brains need.
• Best Use of Gemma: Local Gemma gives Momo his sleepy voice during sessions, writes the daily thought on the home screen, turns messy post-rest notes into clean JSON leaves, and finds weekly patterns in the Leaf Book, all on localhost.

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Thanks for reading. Now close this tab, put your phone face-down, lean back, and go do nothing for 5 minutes. Momo will wait. 🌿🦥