{
  "id": 15679214,
  "title": "Sloth — the lazy task triager (local Gemma does your organizing)",
  "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/10/20/sloth-the-lazy-task-triager-local-gemma-does-your-organizing",
  "topic": "tech",
  "section": "Tech",
  "published": "2026-10-20T01:20:45.000Z",
  "source": {
    "name": "Dev.to",
    "slug": "dev-to",
    "url": "https://dev.to/raju12345raju/sloth-the-lazy-task-triager-local-gemma-does-your-organizing-5hep"
  },
  "original_language": "en",
  "account": "This submission for the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 3 showcases Sloth, a minimal command-line interface (CLI) that organizes your unstructured thoughts, tasks, and reminders into a concise, prioritized action plan with time estimates. Developed in the Oct 19–25 window, Sloth is named after the sloths that embody the philosophy of \"slow and steady,\" conserving energy and letting others handle the work.\n\nSloth's core functionality is powered by Gemma 3, an open-weight model running locally via Ollama. Users input a brain-dump text file, and Gemma deduplicates the content, eliminates noise, and ranks tasks by impact and effort. The tool then selects the most crucial first action. The process is entirely local, ensuring privacy as no data leaves the user's laptop. Sloth is built using Python 3.10 and the stdlib, with no additional installations required.\n\nThe project includes 13 passing tests and Continuous Integration (CI) on every push, ensuring reliability. The code is available on GitHub under the MIT license. The tool costs nothing per run, as all processing happens locally with an open-weight model, eliminating the need for paid AI services.\n\nThe project emphasizes the importance of open innovation by providing privacy, zero marginal costs, and swappability. Users can modify the SLOTH_MODEL environment variable to use any Ollama model, including larger, more capable ones. The tool also provides transparent tracing of latency, tokens in/out, and cost with each run, accessible via sloth trace.\n\nThe creation of Sloth involved collaboration with an AI coding assistant, Muse Spark, which helped draft the initial code. The final product demonstrates the power of open-source AI in providing a practical, economical, and privacy-conscious solution for task management.",
  "summary": "This is a submission for the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 3 What I Built Sloth is a tiny CLI that takes your messy brain-dump — half-formed tasks, notes, random thoughts, copy-pasted reminders — and hands back a short, prioritized action plan with time estimates and one \"do this first\" pick. The pitch is one line: dump your brain, Sloth sorts it. You never organize; the sloth does.…",
  "key_points": [],
  "editors_take": null,
  "illustration": null,
  "coverage": {
    "outlets": 2,
    "also_reported_by": [
      {
        "outlet": "Dev.to",
        "title": "Lim Local: an offline contract checker for freelancers, built with Gemma 4",
        "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/10/18/lim-local-an-offline-contract-checker-for-freelancers-built-with",
        "published": "2026-10-18T14:42:30.000Z"
      }
    ]
  },
  "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."
}