{
  "id": 13503488,
  "title": "🌱 GrassTime: Touch Grass, Not Your Screen | Hacktoberfest 2026",
  "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/10/10/grasstime-touch-grass-not-your-screen-hacktoberfest-2026",
  "topic": "ai",
  "section": "AI",
  "published": "2026-10-10T19:08:26.000Z",
  "source": {
    "name": "Dev.to",
    "slug": "dev-to",
    "url": "https://dev.to/harshmahajan29/grasstime-touch-grass-not-your-screen-hacktoberfest-2026-3p43"
  },
  "original_language": "en",
  "account": "This is a submission for the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 1 titled \"Touch Grass\". The app, GrassTime, aims to help users break the habit of mindless scrolling on their phones by providing them with engaging, AI-generated challenges to do in the real world. Instead of scrolling endlessly when bored, users can open GrassTime and receive a challenge to try right away. The app offers a variety of challenges such as discovering random activities, receiving AI-generated ideas, completing quick tasks, and marking them as completed. The simple interface encourages users to disconnect from their screens and reconnect with the real world. The challenges are designed to be achievable in a short amount of time, ranging from 5 to 30 minutes, and focus on real-world activities such as creativity, observation, physical movement, social interaction, and everyday adventures. The AI behind GrassTime is Qwen, an open-weight AI model, which dynamically generates challenges. This approach allows developers to experiment with AI-generated content without relying on a closed-model API. By using an open-weight model, the project promotes open innovation, enabling developers to explore model behavior, experiment with prompts, and adapt the AI to a specific purpose. GrassTime is open source, and contributions are welcome. Developers are encouraged to build, share, inspect, and improve ideas together. The project explores the question of whether AI can help people spend less time consuming digital content and more time experiencing the world around them. The idea behind GrassTime is to make the time spent on phones more intentional, moving away from another piece of digital content to experience something in the real world.",
  "summary": "This is a submission for the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 1: Touch Grass What I Built We have all experienced this: you open your phone because you're bored, scroll through social media for a few minutes, and suddenly an hour has disappeared. What if your phone could give you a reason to put it down? That's why I built GrassTime 🌱 — an app designed to help people break the cycle…",
  "key_points": [],
  "editors_take": null,
  "illustration": null,
  "coverage": {
    "outlets": 1,
    "also_reported_by": []
  },
  "ai_generated": true,
  "disclaimer": "Summaries, key points and the editor’s take are written by software from other outlets’ reporting and may contain errors — always check the linked original."
}