DEADBYTE — An AI Archaeologist for Abandoned Software
This is a submission for the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 4: Ghost in the Machine What I Built What happens when software is abandoned? Repositories become inactive. Dependencies disappear. APIs become obsolete. Documentation gets outdated. Eventually, the people who understood the s
Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge: Ghost in the Machine Submission 👻🌼
This is a submission for the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 4: Ghost in the Machine
What happens when software is abandoned?
Repositories become inactive. Dependencies disappear. APIs become obsolete. Documentation gets outdated. Eventually, the people who understood the system move on, leaving behind fragments of what once worked.
I built DEADBYTE, a local-first AI archaeologist that investigates abandoned and legacy software projects.
The idea behind the project was to interpret Ghost in the Machine quite literally: software may be dead, but its source code, comments, dependencies, error logs, and configuration files still contain traces of its past.
DEADBYTE examines those traces and attempts to reconstruct the story.
The goal isn't to pretend that AI can know why a project was abandoned. Instead, DEADBYTE tries to distinguish what the evidence actually shows from what might merely be a hypothesis.
Think of it as digital archaeology, with a little horror mixed in.
Watch the demo video to see DEADBYTE investigate a sample legacy project, collect evidence, generate AI-assisted findings, and produce a structured investigation report.
The complete source code is available on GitHub:
DEADBYTE is a local-first AI archaeologist for abandoned and legacy software. It scans a project without executing it, collects traceable evidence, asks a local Ollama model to interpret the evidence, and writes a Markdown case report.
ollama pull qwen3. 5:9b python - m venv.venv.\.venv\Scripts\Activate.ps1 python - m pip install - e ".[dev] " deadbyte doctor deadbyte investigate.\examples\haunted_project -- model qwen3. 5:9b Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode Without AI:
deadbyte investigate.\examples\haunted_project -- no - ai Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode Reports are saved under deadbyte_cases/<case-id>/.
DEADBYTE does not execute project code, build scripts, or installers. It skips common generated directories, binary files, symlinks, and obvious secret files. AI mode sends selected evidence to the configured Ollama endpoint (…