RepoSeance: Resurrecting Dead Code with Local Open-Weight AI
This is a submission for the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 4: Ghost in the Machine What I Built Every software engineer inherits a codebase that feels haunted. You clone an archived repository or checkout an unfamiliar branch, and you are immediately greeted by the restless spirits of
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
Every software engineer inherits a codebase that feels haunted.
You clone an archived repository or checkout an unfamiliar branch, and you are immediately greeted by the restless spirits of past developers: cryptic // TODO: fix this before Friday comments written five years ago, half-implemented refactors abandoned mid-stride, and git commit messages like "wip: it works on my machine".
Usually, the institutional knowledge died when the original authors left the company or archived the repository.
RepoSeance is an open-source, local-first software archaeology tool. Rather than treating legacy or abandoned repositories as landfill, RepoSeance conducts a digital séance over your git history. It reconstructs project chronology, indexes unmerged branch inflection points, scans for orphaned TODO/FIXME markers, and summons an interactive, evidence-grounded AI assistant powered completely offline by Google's open-weight Gemma 2 model.
Ask RepoSeance why a module was rewritten, what features were abandoned, or where the riskiest architectural debt lies—and it will answer you with verified citations linking to exact commit SHAs, line numbers, and author timestamps.
Hackathon: Hacktoberfest 2026 — Ghost in the Machine Oracle AI: Google Gemma 2 (Local Inference via Ollama) Tech Stack: Python, Flask, React, Vite, SQLite (FTS5), GitPython
RepoSeance is an AI-powered software archaeology tool designed to explore, understand, and revive abandoned, archived, or unfamiliar codebases.
Rather than treating legacy code as disposable, RepoSeance reconstructs a project's development history from its Git commits, source code markers ( TODO, FIXME, HACK ), unresolved issues, and pull requests. Users interact with a conversational AI assistant that adopts the persona of the Repository Ghost — providing evidence-grounded answers about past architectural decisions, recurring bugs, and unfinished ambitions without hallucinating.