Rest in Repo: a graveyard for your dead side projects, powered by local Gemma

Description and use

Rest in Repo turns a folder of abandoned side projects into a static HTML memorial, assigning each a cause of death, a locally generated eulogy, and a resurrection plan, all without sending data to the cloud.

Problem

Developers accumulate abandoned side projects that remain in a folder, creating clutter and guilt.

Outcome

A zero‑cost, privacy‑preserving tool that transforms abandoned code into a meaningful, locally generated memorial with actionable steps to revive projects.

Workflow

• Pull the Gemma model locally via Ollama
• Run the script with the path to the projects folder and optional flags
• The script reads git history to classify each project’s cause of death using deterministic rules
• A number validator ensures the eulogy contains only factual numbers
• Gemma generates a eulogy for each project based on the classified facts
• The script renders a static HTML page with tombstones, heatmaps, and resurrection plans
• Export options include PNG share cards and a cemetery map view

Evidence

Rest in Repo turns that folder into an actual graveyard — one spooky static HTML page where each dead project gets a tombstone, a cause of death, and a eulogy written by a local Gemma model.

Source

The core design decision is that the model never gets to decide why a project died. Deterministic rules read the git history and classify it:

Source

In testing, gemma3:4b invented a number on 1 of 6 eulogies raw and 0 of 6 after the retry loop; qwen2.5:7b was 0 of 6 raw but roughly twice as slow (~21s vs ~11s per eulogy).

Source