git séance: I asked the ghost of `request` why it died, and made it cite its sources
This is a submission for the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 4: Ghost in the Machine What I Built request was the HTTP library of Node.js for a decade. In 2019 its author wrote #3142 , "Request's Past, Present and Future", and in 2020 it went into maintenance mode. The code is still on npm. The reasons are scattered across 3,477 issues and pull requests, 12,441 comments and 2,290…
Git séance is an open-source tool that allows users to ask questions about the history of an abandoned project. It uses a local open-weight model (Gemma 4 through Ollama) to answer questions based on the project's history. Git séance is designed for projects that have gone into maintenance mode, such as the Node.js HTTP library Request, which stopped receiving updates in 2020 after a decade of development.
The tool gathers information from the project's issues, pull requests, comments, and commits, creating a graph of relationships between them. It then uses this graph to answer questions, citing specific issues or commits as its sources. This ensures that the answers are grounded in the project's actual history, rather than speculative or personal opinions.
In the case of Request, git séance was used to investigate why the library automatically decompressed gzip responses. The answer was traced to a specific pull request (number 951), which was merged into the project's history in July 2014. The citation is a direct link to the commit (b66e4cd) that introduced this feature. This method of citing specific sources allows users to understand the rationale behind the library's current behavior, even in projects that have been abandoned.
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