Kuyo: a Japanese-style memorial tool that lays deleted code to rest with local AI epitaphs

Kuyo is a tool that treats deleted source files as the dead, drawing on the Japanese kuyo tradition of memorializing objects that served well. It scans a git repository for removed files, following renames, and records each file's lifespan, time of death, commit size, test coverage, and final commit message. A local Gemma model running on Ollama writes an epitaph for each file, and the results are rendered as a self-contained HTML cemetery. The author demonstrated it on a private repository with 137 deleted files, where the code itself never left the machine. The project offers commands for scanning, burying, consulting a file's ghost, and running as a GitHub Action.