Slow and steady, a little lazy: I built a garden that grows from small commits

Description and use

Moss Garden turns small commits into a growing garden, rewarding consistency without penalizing missed days.

Problem

Contribution graphs punish missed days, discouraging steady, low‑intensity work.

Outcome

Moss Garden provides a persistent, low‑pressure productivity game that turns small commits into a growing garden, encouraging steady work without the anxiety of streak loss.

Workflow

• Sign in with GitHub
• Select repositories to count
• GitHub webhook posts commits to Moss Garden API
• API calculates XP with diminishing returns per day
• XP updates garden state (plants, badges)
• Nightly sync aggregates commits
• Optional AI gardener writes weekly journal

Evidence

Moss Garden is a slow‑productivity game for developers. You sign in with GitHub, pick the repositories that count, and every small commit you author grows a hand‑drawn garden of moss, ferns, flowers and a young maple.

Source

Each commit is worth less the more you push in one day (1x, 0.5x, 0.25x, then 0.1x), and daily XP caps at 40.

Source

Open‑weight model: Gemma 4 through Backboard. google/gemma-4-26b-a4b-it names new plants and writes the weekly journal.

Source

The game itself is deliberately not AI. XP, levels, vitality, plant growth and badges live in a pure Python rules engine with 409 pytest cases.

Source

Render cron jobs are not free, so a second GitHub Actions workflow calls POST /api/jobs/nightly with a bearer secret for the nightly sync.

Source