Haunted Terminal: a Victorian ghost lives in my shell

ANKIT — Thu, 29 Oct 2026 13:09:48 +0000

This is a submission for the Hacktober fest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 4: Ghost in the Machine

What I Built

Haunted Terminal is a small Python wrapper around your shell. You type normal commands and they run as usual, then a ghost whispers one line about what you just did. The ghost is a Victorian spirit who died in 1893 and is baffled by modern computers. It sounds amused when a command works and mournful when it fails.

For "Ghost in the Machine", I took the theme literally: the ghost lives inside the machine and comments on everything you do.

A failed command (notrealcommand) got this:

The rain still falls, even here within this cold, electric silence.

A typo (exxit) got this:

A chill, a lingering echo, and a vast, empty screen.

Demo

Share a deployed link or a video demo.

Code

creatorhere / haunted-terminal

Haunted Terminal

A small Python shell wrapper where a ghost whispers about every command you run. The ghost is a local open-weight model (Gemma 3 via Ollama), so it runs fully offline and your commands never leave your machine.

Built for the Hacktoberfest 2026 Open-Source AI Challenge (theme: Ghost in the Machine).

How it works

You type a normal command (dir, echo hello, cd ..).
The command runs, and its output is shown as usual.
The command and a trimmed copy of its output are sent to a local model through Ollama.
The ghost whispers one short line about what you just did. It sounds amused when a command works and mournful when it fails.
Every whisper is saved to haunting_log.txt.

Requirements

Python 3.9 or newer
Ollama
The ollama Python package

Setup

ollama pull gemma3:1b
pip install ollama

Run

python haunted.py

Type exit to leave…

View on GitHub

How I Built It

WThe ghost is Gemma 3 (1B), an open-weight model, running locally through Ollama and called from Python. After each command, the script sends the command and a trimmed copy of its output to the model, prints the one-line reply, and saves it to haunting_log.txt.

def haunt(cmd, output, failed):
    mood = ("The command FAILED. Be mournful and dramatic."
            if failed else "The command worked. Be eerie and slightly amused.")
    system = (f"You are {GHOST}, trapped inside a terminal. {mood} "
              "Reply with ONE short sentence. No emojis, no explanations.")
    r = ollama.chat(model=MODEL, messages=[
        {"role": "system", "content": system},
        {"role": "user", "content": f"Command: {cmd}\nOutput: {output[:400]}"},
    ])
    return r["message"]["content"].strip()

A few things I learned along the way:

On my first runs the ghost said "the spirits are silent" because I hadn't downloaded the model yet (a 404). That was accidentally on theme.
A 1B model has a small vocabulary. Reading my haunting log, the ghost kept coming back to words like "Remarkable" and "perplexing". It started to feel like a character, but a very repetitive one.
Interactive programs don't work inside the ghost terminal, so it only handles normal commands.

Why Does Open Innovation Matter?

It works offline. The ghost needs no internet or API key.
Your commands stay private. Shell commands can contain private paths and data. I didn't want a terminal companion that sent every command to a cloud server, and with a local model nothing leaves my machine.
Everything is swappable. Change one line and the ghost becomes a grumpy sysadmin or a pirate, or runs on a different model.

The Spirit of It

My favourite moment was typing echo thank you and getting this back:

Remarkable. The machine seems to understand gratitude, though its purpose remains… perplexing.

Prize Categories

Best Use of Gemma.

DEV Community: ANKIT