git-ofrenda: an altar for the code your repo buried, with epitaphs by Gemma on a plain CPU 🕯️

Description and use

git‑ofrenda finds permanently deleted files, pulls their history from git, and uses the Gemma 3 model to generate epitaphs, building a static altar page of headstones. It preserves facts and remembrance locally without external APIs.

Problem

Repositories accumulate deleted files that are forgotten; developers lack a way to remember and honor the work that was removed.

Outcome

On a 2‑core ARM machine, building an altar of 12 headstones for the Express repo took 317 s with Gemma 3 4B, producing no template‑generated epitaphs. The tool preserves git facts and generates unique, model‑written epitaphs, enabling a static remembrance page and interactive seances.

Workflow

• Walk git history to find files deleted and never re-added
• Collect birth, death, commit count, caretakers, last lines of code for each file
• Use a local Gemma 3 model to generate an epitaph and remembrance for each file
• Build a static HTML altar with headstones for selected files
• Optionally run a seance to ask a dead file questions

Evidence

git-ofrenda digs them up: 1) It walks your git history and finds every file that was deleted and never came back.

Source

A local open-weight model (Gemma 3, through Ollama or llama.cpp) writes each one an epitaph and a short remembrance.

Source

It builds an altar: one static page with a candlelit headstone per file.

Source

All on a machine with 2 ARM CPU cores, 7 GB RAM and no GPU: Altar of 12 headstones Gemma 3 4B (Q4_K_M) 317 s (≈26 s per file)

Source