Git Séance — Summoning the Ghosts of Abandoned Repositories with Gemma 2

Ansh Vasant — Thu, 29 Oct 2026 15:54:50 +0000

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

"Every abandoned repository has a ghost. Every ghost has something left to say."

What I Built

Git Séance resurrects the original maintainers of abandoned GitHub repositories as interactive, fully-voiced spectral personas from their specific coding era.

Give it any dead or archived GitHub repo URL, and it will:

👻 Summon the Maintainer's Spirit: Uses Gemma 2 to analyze git logs, file trees, and commit dates to reconstruct the ghost's voice, era, personality, and cause of abandonment.
💬 Interactive Terminal Séance: Converse with the ghost through a retro CRT terminal about unfinished PRs and forgotten code.
🔊 Spectral Voice (ElevenLabs & Web Audio API): Streams authentic, whispered maintainer voices in real time through an active Web Audio context with ambient ducking.
👁 Spectral Code Review & Resurrection Diff: The ghost reviews modern changes and modernizes its own legacy code with eerie commentary.
🪦 Tombstone Memorial Export: Generates an authentic stone tombstone card with final commit stats, exportable directly to PNG.
🌸 Ofrenda Mode (Día de los Muertos): Switch from cold obsidian glass into a glowing altar of marigolds and candlelight.

Demo

- Live App: [https://git-seance-liau.onrender.com]

Code

- GitHub: [https://github.com/KIJ-JIK/Git-Seance]

How I Built It

AI Engine: Gemma 2 (gemma2:27b via local Ollama for offline use, gemma2-9b-it in cloud for zero-cold-start web demos).
Audio Pipeline: ElevenLabs neural voice synthesis (eleven_turbo_v2_5) decoded directly through the browser's Web Audio API, synchronized with procedural wind, bells, and wolf howling.
Full Stack: Next.js 16 (App Router, React 19), Tailwind CSS v4, MongoDB Atlas (graveyard wall), and Sentry SDK observability.
Deployment: Render Node.js service via version-controlled render.yaml.

Why Does Open Innovation Matter?

Closed corporate AI models optimize for modern commercial web tech and discard obscure computing history as worthless noise.

By building Git Séance on Gemma 2, anyone can run a complete séance locally and offline. Open-weight AI ensures that digital heritage belongs to developers, preserving the human stories behind the code that built the modern world.

The Spirit of It

Git logs are human memoirs. When a project goes quiet, it means life happened — a startup folded, priorities shifted, or someone moved on. Git Séance gives abandoned code closure.

Prize Categories

Overall Grand Prize: Built for the "Ghost in the Machine" prompt, uniting Halloween with Día de los Muertos.
Best Use of Gemma ($200): Gemma 2 powers ghost personality synthesis, spectral code reviews, and resurrection diffs.
Best Use of Render ($200): Hosted on Render via automated render.yaml infrastructure.
Best Use of ElevenLabs ($100): Custom maintainer voice synthesis streamed through Web Audio.
Best Use of MongoDB Atlas ($100): Persists the public Graveyard Wall of séanced repos.
Best Use of Sentry Agent Tracing ($100): Traces model latency and token budgets with @sentry/nextjs.

“They compiled. They pushed. They were forgotten. Until tonight.”

DEV Community: Ansh Vasant