SEANCE: Talk to the Ghost of a Dead Programming Language (runs offline)

Ria Mehta — Thu, 29 Oct 2026 15:06:47 +0000

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

What I Built

SEANCE is a terminal chatbot where you summon the spirit of a dead (or dying) programming language and talk to it. You can choose any one of COBOL, FORTRAN, Perl or Lisp, and the ghost answers in its own voice. COBOL mourns punch cards and batch jobs, FORTRAN is bitter that nobody remembers it fondly, Perl speaks in cryptic one-liners, and Lisp drowns in parentheses.

Demo

drive.google.com

Code

ria447 / Seance-

🕯️Seance

Built for the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge, Week 4: Ghost in the Machine.

SEANCE is a terminal chatbot where you summon the spirit of a dead (or dying) programming language and talk to it. You can choose any one of COBOL, FORTRAN, Perl or Lisp, and the ghost answers in its own voice. COBOL mourns punch cards and batch jobs, FORTRAN is bitter that nobody remembers it fondly, Perl speaks in cryptic one-liners, and Lisp drowns in parentheses.

#	Spirit	Personality
1	COBOL	Weary bank-mainframe veteran, haunted by punch cards and batch jobs
2	FORTRAN	Proud rocket-trajectory scientist, bitter that nobody remembers it
3	Perl	Cryptic one-liners and regex riddles
4	Lisp	Drowning in parentheses, mourning the AI winter

They will still answer real coding questions, just in character.

Why open-source AI?

Works with Wi-Fi off. Everything runs locally; no API, no cloud.
Free to run. No API key…

View on GitHub

How I Built It

Model used: Google Gemma 3(1B) that runs on Ollama.
Code: A single Python script using the ollama library.
Personas: Each spirit is a system prompt (already in the code).
What the model got wrong: It nails the character/persona but provides wrong syntax for the code. The Lisp ghost wrote correct code with one extra closing parenthesis. The FORTRAN ghost wrote BASIC-style pseudo-code instead of real FORTRAN (wrong MOD usage, missing END IF, hardcoded input), and it did this consistently across repeated runs of the same prompt. So SEANCE is entertainment, not a coding assistant.

Why Does Open Innovation Matter?

It works with wifi off.
Costs nothing to run- no API, no billing.
Nothing I type leaves my machine.
I could pick a model that fits my laptop. My storage was limited, so I chose a 1B model (about 800 MB). Swapping to a bigger or different model is a one-line change (MODEL = "gemma3:1b"). A closed API doesn't give you that choice.

The Spirit of It

The moment that made me laugh: I asked the Lisp ghost for a function that squares a number, and it got the code almost right but added one extra closing parenthesis- a Lisp ghost, haunted by its own brackets- also, the audacity of the FORTRAN spirit to assume that the code it gave was correct.

DEV Community: Ria Mehta