TouchGrass AI: An Open-Source AI That Gets You Outside

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

What I Built

TouchGrass AI: An Open-Source Outdoor Activity Planner

TouchGrass AI is an AI-powered outdoor activity planner designed to help people spend less time scrolling and more time exploring the world around them.

Instead of recommending another app to spend hours on, the goal is to use AI to help people find simple, achievable activities outside their homes based on their available time, interests, energy level, and budget.

The idea is simple: tell the app how much free time you have and what you feel like doing, and it generates practical suggestions such as going for a walk, exploring a new neighborhood, visiting a nearby park, or trying a photography challenge.

The project is designed around accessibility, privacy, and real-world action rather than maximizing screen time.

The goal isn't to build another addictive app. It's to build an app that gives you a reason to close it.

Demo

A working demo will be added once the application is implemented and deployed.

Code

The source code and setup instructions will be published in a public GitHub repository once the initial implementation is ready.

How I Built It

The project is planned around an open-source AI model, with the model responsible for turning a user's preferences into structured outdoor activity suggestions.

The proposed architecture includes:

• AI: An open-weight language model for generating personalized activity ideas.
• Backend: A lightweight API to manage prompts and validate generated suggestions.
• Frontend: A simple, mobile-friendly interface focused on getting users to take action.
• Privacy: Minimal collection of user data, with the option to support local inference depending on the chosen model and deployment environment.

The main technical challenge is making the suggestions useful, affordable, and actionable instead of returning generic advice such as “go outside and enjoy nature.”

Why Does Open Innovation Matter?

An open-source AI project makes it possible to experiment with different models, inspect their limitations, customize their behavior, and potentially run inference locally.

This matters because a project focused on everyday habits shouldn't need an expensive proprietary API or require users to hand over unnecessary personal information.

Open innovation also makes the project easier for contributors to improve. Developers can experiment with alternative models, add localization, improve activity recommendations, and adapt the experience to different communities.

The long-term goal is to make useful AI accessible without turning every interaction into a dependency on a closed platform.

My Agent Session

An agent session will be shared once the development workflow has been completed and a session recording is available.

Prize Categories

Open-source AI and real-world utility, subject to the challenge's official eligibility criteria.