🌱 GrassTime: Touch Grass, Not Your Screen | Hacktoberfest 2026

Harsh Mahajan — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 19:08:26 +0000

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

What I Built

We have all experienced this: you open your phone because you're bored, scroll through social media for a few minutes, and suddenly an hour has disappeared.

What if your phone could give you a reason to put it down?

That's why I built GrassTime 🌱 — an app designed to help people break the cycle of mindless scrolling by giving them fun, AI-generated, real-world challenges.

Instead of endlessly scrolling when you're bored, open GrassTime and get a challenge to try in the real world!

Here's what you can do:

🌿 Discover random challenges: Get fun activities that encourage you to step away from your screen.
🤖 AI-generated ideas: Challenges are generated using Qwen, an open-weight AI model.
⏱️ Quick activities: Challenges are designed to be achievable in a short amount of time.
🎯 Take action: Try a challenge, get another one, or mark it as completed.
🌍 Reconnect with the real world: Explore your surroundings, get creative, move around, or try something different.

The idea is simple: your phone shouldn't just be a source of distraction; it can also help you discover what to do beyond the screen.

GrassTime is for anyone who finds themselves reaching for their phone whenever they have nothing to do.

Because sometimes, you don't need another video. You need something to do. 🌱

Demo

Screenshots

Code

💻 GitHub Repository: https://github.com/Harshmahajan29/HactoberFest_AI

The project is open source, and contributions are welcome!

If you have ideas for creative offline challenges, improvements to the experience, or new ways to help people spend less time mindlessly scrolling, I'd love to hear them.

How I Built It

I built GrassTime around a straightforward idea: use AI to encourage people to do things outside the digital world.

The AI Behind GrassTime

I used Qwen, an open-weight AI model, to generate challenges dynamically. Rather than relying entirely on a predefined list of activities, the application asks the model to generate one practical, engaging offline challenge at a time.

The model is instructed to generate challenges that are:

Achievable in approximately 5–30 minutes.
Safe, practical, and easy to understand.
Focused on real-world activities rather than screen-based entertainment.
Varied across creativity, observation, physical movement, social interaction, and everyday adventures.

Each generated challenge includes a title, estimated duration, instructions, and a clear completion goal.

The Application

GrassTime combines a simple, nature-inspired interface with AI-generated challenges. The experience is intentionally focused: users should be able to get a challenge quickly without navigating complicated menus or spending more time on the app than necessary.

The core interaction is simple:

Open GrassTime → Get a challenge → Try it in the real world → Come back when you're ready for another.

The goal isn't to create another app that demands users' attention. It's to make the time they spend on their phones more intentional.

Why Does Open Innovation Matter?

For GrassTime, open innovation matters because it makes AI experimentation more accessible and gives developers greater control over how AI is used.

Using an open-weight model like Qwen gives developers the opportunity to experiment with AI-generated content without building the entire experience around a proprietary, closed-model API.

It also makes projects like GrassTime a learning opportunity. Developers can explore model behaviour, experiment with prompts, and adapt the AI to a specific purpose rather than treating it as a black box.

Most importantly, open innovation allows people to build, share, inspect, and improve ideas together.

GrassTime is a small project, but it explores a question I find interesting:

Can we use AI to help people spend less time consuming digital content and more time experiencing the world around them?

I believe AI doesn't always need to keep us engaged with technology. Sometimes, its most useful job is to help us step away from it.

That's the idea I wanted to explore with GrassTime. 🌿

My Agent Session

[ADD YOUR DEVRELAY AGENT SESSION LINK, IF AVAILABLE]

Prize Categories

Open-Weight AI: Qwen, if it meets the challenge's category requirements.
Other applicable partner categories: [ADD ONLY THE CATEGORIES THAT APPLY TO YOUR PROJECT]

Check the official challenge page for category names and eligibility requirements before submitting.

🌱 Final Thoughts

GrassTime started with a simple observation: we often use our phones to escape boredom, even when there are plenty of interesting things we could do around us.

I wanted to experiment with using AI to solve that problem in a different way.

Rather than generating another piece of content to consume, GrassTime generates an activity to experience.

Less scrolling. More doing. More living.

If you try GrassTime, I'd love to hear what challenge you get first!

Hacktoberfest #OpenSource #AI #Qwen #BuildInPublic #TouchGrass

DEV Community: Harsh Mahajan