GadMitra: An AI companion to explore the Sahyadris 🌿

Disha Khanapurkar — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 16:56:06 +0000

This is a submission for the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 1: Touch Grass

What I Built

We spend hours looking at screens, watching travel reels, saving trekking destinations, and telling ourselves we'll explore them someday.

I wanted to build something that could turn that someday into a small adventure.

Meet GadMitra — a companion for exploring Maharashtra's Sahyadri forts, discovering local heritage, and finding reasons to step outdoors.

The idea is simple: choose a fort, tell GadMitra how much time you have, and get an outdoor quest to try. It could be a short exploration, noticing details in an old fort, or taking a moment to appreciate the landscape around you.

Here's what the current prototype includes:

🏞️ Fort discovery: Explore forts through photo-rich cards.
🧭 Quest generation: A backend-powered flow for generating outdoor activities based on your selection and preferences. AI generation is still being worked on.
🎉 Quest completion: Mark a quest complete and celebrate with a confetti animation.

I'm also exploring photo-based quest verification, an AI companion for questions about forts and nature, and adventure collages people can share after their trips.

The goal isn't to make people spend more time in another app. It's to give them a reason to put their phones away and experience the world around them.

Demo

Screenshots and demo video:

Screen Recording 2026-10-11 221611.mp4 - Google Drive

drive.google.com

I'll share a walkthrough of the fort selection, quest flow, and completion celebration here.

Code

GitHub repository: https://github.com/DishaKhanapurkar/GadMitra

Built with Angular, FastAPI, and Python.

How I Built It

GadMitra uses Angular for the frontend and FastAPI for the backend.

The frontend lets users explore forts, select a destination, and interact with the quest flow. The backend exposes API endpoints for fort information and quest requests.

I also experimented with Hugging Face Inference Providers for AI-powered quest generation. I ran into a practical challenge: the available inference credits were exhausted, so I still need to resolve the model-inference setup.

Rather than hide that limitation, I'm treating it as part of the learning process. I want to make the AI component reliable and accessible without making the entire outdoor experience dependent on a paid API.

Why Does Open Innovation Matter?

Outdoor exploration shouldn't need an expensive subscription or a complicated setup.

Open-source tools make it possible to experiment with AI, understand how the pieces fit together, and adapt the experience to local needs.

For GadMitra, that means building around a place and culture I want to highlight: Maharashtra's forts and the Sahyadri landscape.

It also means other developers can contribute new forts, improve quest generation, add languages, or build features that make outdoor exploration more accessible.

I'd love to see this grow beyond a prototype into something that helps more people discover the places around them.

My Agent Session

Optional — I'll add a DevRelay session link if I capture one.

Prize Categories

No additional partner prize category claimed at this stage.

GadMitra 🌿 — A little less scrolling. A little more exploring.

What would get you outdoors more often: discovering hidden places, learning local history, or completing small nature quests?

DEV Community: Disha Khanapurkar