rip: A local graveyard and ofrenda for forgotten side projects

What I Built

Every developer has a drive full of abandoned side quests: half-finished prototypes, 2 AM scripts, and repos whose last commit was simply "fixing bugs please work". Usually, they just sit there until an aggressive disk cleanup wipes them out.

For Halloween and Día de los Muertos, I built rip: a local CLI tool that acts as a digital cemetery for dead code.

It scans your workspaces for dormant projects, reads strictly high-level metadata (last modified date, size, and last Git commit), and pipes it into a local Google Gemma 2 (2B) instance. Gemma acts as the gravekeeper, writing witty epitaphs for why each project died.

With the --ofrenda flag, it channels Día de los Muertos by turning the eulogy into an altar, offering actionable sparks to resurrect the project today.

Demo

The generated dark-mode visual cemetery view (cemetery.html):

In the terminal, it renders ASCII tombstones before generating the web gallery:

     .---.
    / RIP /
   |  ___  |   rust-game-engine-attempt
   | |   | |   "It chased a dream of a world built in rust, but the compiler's silence remains."
   |_|___|_|
   🌼 Ofrenda Revival: Seek the engine's heart. A compiler update might be the spark to bring it back.

Code

Razorbillworks / rip

a local graveyard for dead side projects. scans stale folders, writes obituaries, and hints at revivals with local gemma-2.

A local CLI tool and digital cemetery built for Hacktoberfest 2026: Ghost in the Machine.
Channels the spirits of forgotten scripts and abandoned repositories using local Google Gemma 2 (2B)

Overview

Every developer's drive hosts a quiet graveyard: incomplete prototypes, late-night experiments, and uncommitted scripts.

rip acts as a respectful gravekeeper. It traverses your workspaces to locate dormant projects, passing strictly metadata (modification age, sizes, and Git commit logs) to an air-gapped Gemma 2 instance. It produces witty obituaries and constructive Ofrenda sparks to resurrect your code, rendered both as ANSI terminal tombstones and a self-contained HTML gallery.

The Graveyard Gallery

Architecture & Open Innovation

Absolute Zero-Content Telemetry: Proprietary APIs require uploading data off your machine. rip runs an open-weight foundation model locally; source code and file contents never touch the inference pipeline.
Offline & Air-Gapped: Runs entirely on local compute through Ollama. No network latency…

View on GitHub

How I Built It

The stack is intentionally minimal and runs 100% locally:

Model: Google's gemma2:2b via Ollama. Gemma 2's instruction-following at 2B parameters made it fast and consistent at returning clean, parseable JSON without hallucinated markdown fences.

CLI & Formatting: Python 3 with rich for terminal panels.

Metadata Pipeline: Standard library pathlib and subprocess to grab git log -1.

rip never reads actual code or file contents. It sends only the project name, days inactive, and the last commit message to Gemma at temperature: 0.7.

Why Does Open Innovation Matter?

Zero-Content Privacy: Developers store credentials, draft scripts, and private code in local folders. Scanning directories using a cloud LLM is an unnecessary data risk. With an open-weight model, zero bytes leave your machine.

True Offline Resilience: Proprietary APIs deprecate endpoints, change pricing, and require Wi-Fi. An open-weight model on Ollama means this tool works on an airplane or 10 years from now with the Wi-Fi toggled off.

No Metered Costs: Scanning 200 forgotten repositories costs $0 in token fees.

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