Ofrenda: A Local AI Altar That Keeps Your Loved Ones’ Memories Alive

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

Ofrenda is a private, local altar for the people you remember.

In Día de los Muertos, an ofrenda is an altar built from the things a person loved: their favorite food, their songs, the objects they kept close, the stories people tell about them. I wanted to build a digital version, one that keeps those memories alive and can be talked to.

You add a person, then place "offerings" on their altar: a food, a song, a story, or an object. Then you can:

I interpreted "Ghost in the Machine" in a gentler way than haunting. The ghost isn't a fake version of your loved one. It's their memory, kept safe by a machine. That's why the Keeper is deliberately not allowed to speak as the person. It's a storyteller who looks after the memories, speaks about them in the third person, and says "that story isn't on the ofrenda yet" instead of making something up.

A private, local altar for people you remember. Place foods, songs, stories and objects on it. Memories are embedded with nomic-embed-text into a Spring AI vector store. The "Keeper" ( llama3.1:8b ) answers using retrieval (RAG) from those memories only, and can write a remembrance or a playful calaverita.

Data is saved to backend/data/ofrenda.json and re-embedded on every startup.