Sanni Yakuma: An AI Exorcism for Your Code, After a Sri Lankan Healing Ritual

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

( https://dev.to/challenges/hacktoberfest-week4-2026-10-26)*

In southern Sri Lanka there is a healing ritual called Sanni Yakuma. It runs from dusk to dawn. It begins with the Ata Paliya, eight dances that bless the patient. Then come the Daha Ata Sanniya: masked dancers bring out the eighteen Sanni demons, one by one. Each demon is believed to cause one illness: deafness, blindness, fever, madness. Each one steps into the torchlight, boasts, and is then mocked, humbled, and persuaded to leave the patient. Last comes their chief, Maha Kola Sanniya, whose mask carries all eighteen demons around his face.

I'm Sri Lankan, and these masks are part of the culture I grew up with. The ritual itself is rarely performed as an exorcism any more; today it lives on mostly as a cultural performance. So for "Ghost in the Machine" I wanted to bring it back in a new place: our codebases.

Sanni Yakuma is an AI exorcism for GitHub repositories. Each of the eighteen demons causes one code sickness:

You give it a repository. It finds which demons possess it, shows the evidence from real files and lines, lets each demon speak, and performs the exorcism: a concrete fix. And, like the real ritual, it is kind first. Before any demon appears, it names the repository's blessings: what it already does well.

The "ghosts" in my demo are fitting ones: famous open-source projects that are now retired or silent, like AngularJS, jQuery Mobile and the Node.js library request.

Live: The Hall of Masks: rituals performed on four well-known retired repositories.

Here is what the ritual found in request, the HTTP library that millions of Node.js projects once depended on:

Abutha Sanniya (severe): "A web of lines I wove in request.js, where init stretches to 137 lines of pure chaos. I watched the developers drown in 58 paths of complexity… You think a few refactors can untangle my knot. Very well, I shall vanish."

Kora Sanniya (severe): "Since February 11, 2020, I have frozen the heart of this machine. One hundred and forty-five souls cry out in the issues, but no hand moves to answer them… I go now to find a living repo."

Both are facts first: Request.prototype.init really is 137 lines with a cyclomatic complexity of 58, and the last commit really was on 11 February 2020. Notice the cure for Kora, too: the model saw that the project is deprecated, so it didn't say "revive it". It said: archive the repository and point users to undici or node-fetch.

And then the verdict of Kola Sanniya, the root cause behind them all, with a blessing verse in Sinhala:

"The project's success led to an accumulation of features that eventually created an unmaintainable monolith."

සාමයෙන් නික්ම යන්න, අලුත් මගක් සොයා ගන්න. Depart in peace, find a new path.

It also runs on pull requests as a GitHub Action. Here it is on its own repository, where it caught a function I wrote:

An AI exorcism for codebases, after the healing ritual of southern Sri Lanka.

In the Sanni Yakuma ritual, masked dancers call out the eighteen Sanni demons, each believed to cause one illness. The demons are questioned, mocked, humbled and sent away. The ritual opens with blessings, and the leader of the demons, Kola Sanniya, comes last.

This tool performs the same ritual on a GitHub repository. Each demon causes one code sickness Plain detectors find the evidence in the code, and an open Gemma model names the demons, gives each one a short monologue, and writes a concrete cure.

Visit the Hall of Masks to see rituals performed on well-known repositories.