CodeRecall - Explain My Own Code to Me(Local AI for a friend's Forgotten Repos)

Ishita chaudhary — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 06:35:47 +0000

This is a submission for the Hacktoberfest Weekend Challenge: Build for a Friend

What I Built

My friend opens their own three-month-old repository and whispers: "why did I write this?" Comments are missing, commit messages say "fix stuff," and commercial AI assistants either give generic answers or require uploading the whole private repo to someone else's server.

CodeRecall is a local AI assistant that explains your own code back to you — not just what it does, but why it exists — using the repo itself as evidence: source code, tests, docs, and Git history.

Planned features (building this weekend):

📂 Index a local Git repo: code, README, tests, commits, diffs
💬 Ask things like "Why does this function exist?", "What breaks if I delete this?", "Explain this like I haven't seen it in a year"
🔍 Every answer cites file + line numbers and the commit that introduced the code (via git blame / git log)
🧠 Honest answers, split into three parts: Verified behavior → Historical evidence → Possible intent
🔌 100% offline. No API keys. No telemetry. Code never leaves the laptop.

Who it's for: my friend — and every developer who has ever been afraid of their own old repository. Bonus: I'll hand it over to them and share their reaction here.

Demo

In progress — I'm building this through the weekend and will update this section with a screen recording (running fully offline) plus my friend's reaction when I hand it over.

Code

GitHub repo:[https://github.com/ishitaachaudharyy/CodeRecall.git] — currently has the README, architecture, and build plan. Full implementation lands this weekend.

How I Built It

Everything runs locally

Gemma (Google's open-weight model) running locally via Ollama — the reasoning core
nomic-embed-text (local embeddings) for semantic search over the codebase
Tree-sitter to chunk code by function/class instead of random line counts
Chroma (local vector DB) + SQLite for metadata (file paths, commits, notes)
Gradio for a simple local UI
Plain git log / git blame / git show — no AI needed to extract the "why" evidence Pipeline: epo → parse (Tree-sitter) → chunk → embed locally → retrieve (code + docs + tests + commits) → Gemma → answer with citations

Why Does Open Innovation Matter?

Source code is the most sensitive thing a developer owns: credentials, client work, unreleased features. A closed AI product means uploading your private repo to a server you don't control — a non-starter for my friend's client work.

With open weights, CodeRecall:

Runs on my friend's laptop, fully offline — the code physically never leaves the machine
Costs $0 to run — no subscription, no per-token fees
Is swappable — Gemma 4B on their old laptop, Gemma 12B on mine; change one Ollama line
Is inspectable — we can read every prompt, tune the retrieval, and fix weird answers ourselves

A closed API literally cannot offer the core promise of this tool: your code stays yours.

My Agent Session

I'll link my DevRelay agent session here as I build this weekend.

Prize Categories

Best Use of Gemma — Gemma is the open-weight model at the heart of CodeRecall, running fully locally via Ollama with zero API calls.

DEV Community: Ishita chaudhary