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Tanisha Naruka
Tanisha Naruka

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Exhume

#devchallenge #hf26challenge

This is submission for hacktoberfest 2026 challenge week 4

What I Built

Everyone has a folder of abandoned side projects. Exhume scans your git repos, works out which ones are dead, and writes an autopsy for each.

python exhume.py --scan ~/projects --serve
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It reads each repo's history and computes the facts: birth date, last commit, days dead, busiest month, authors, leftover TODO/FIXME notes, and a cause of death. The cause comes from a plain heuristic. A last commit like "wip rewrite parser" means "left half-finished".

Then it opens a dashboard styled as a hospital ward of patient monitors:

  • Overview: one monitor per repo. Living repos read STABLE, and dead ones show a flat line and ASYSTOLE.
  • Case file: the autopsy report, an ECG of the commit history, and searchable commits.
  • Activity: a weekday-by-hour heatmap and contributors.
  • Séance: a chat where you question a dead repo.

The part I care about: the AI has to prove it

A local Gemma model (via Ollama) writes the autopsy, but language models invent things. So every commit hash, year, and "N days/commits/authors" in the report is checked against git. A sentence with a detail git can't back up is cut, and the model gets one retry. A badge on the Autopsy card shows how many claims were checked and how many invented details were removed.

The Séance works the same way. It searches the repo's commit messages first and gives only matching commits to the model. If nothing matches, it replies "The repo doesn't say." without calling the model at all. Every answer shows the commits it came from.

Everything runs on your machine. The server listens on 127.0.0.1 only.

How it's built

  • Python standard library only. The only extra is Ollama, for the AI parts.
  • One self-contained HTML dashboard, with no frameworks.
  • If Ollama isn't running, a template-written report is used and the page says so.

Limits

The verifier only catches what it can check: hashes, years and counts. A vague claim like "the project lost momentum" gets through. The cause of death is a simple heuristic, not insight. [Say how many real repos you ran it on and what you found.]

Code

https://github.com/tanisha-naruka/Exhume.git
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1YN5wLZN9oyfTTQfydrUKzfftbN25P35g/view?usp=drive_link

Which of your own repos would you dig up first?

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