git séance: a tool that lets a local AI answer questions from an abandoned project's own history

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git séance is an open-source tool that answers questions about why an abandoned project works the way it does, using the project's issues, pull requests, comments, and commits. The author demonstrates it on the Node.js HTTP library request, which was in maintenance mode from 2020 and has thousands of threads and commits to draw from. The answers are generated by a local open-weight model run through Ollama, which is restricted to the retrieved history. Every claim is tied to a cited issue or commit, and citations not present in the retrieved evidence are stripped out. The tool is aimed at developers who inherit or depend on unmaintained projects and want context before making changes.

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