Build. Decay. Resurrect.
A cinematic digital afterlife for software projects. Give your abandoned code a resting place, or resurrect dead projects to build their lineage.
Code Afterlife is a full-stack platform built to honor the lifecycle of open-source and indie software. Projects are tracked organically through a dynamic state machine: aging from Born, to Active, to Stalled, and finally Dead. Dead projects can be claimed and resurrected by new developers, spawning intricate family trees.
- Atmospheric 3D Graveyard: Explore an interactive, cinematic graveyard built with Three.js featuring volumetric fog, parallax moon haze, and dynamic tombstones for dead repositories.
- Dynamic Aging & Decay: Projects age in real-time. If you stop pushing code to GitHub, your project decays from
ACTIVEtoSTALLED, and eventually dies. As health drops, the UI visually fades and loses saturation. - Smart Health Algorithms: Advanced algorithms calculate momentum, consistency, and activity based on GitHub API integration to generate a 0-100 health score.
- Shipped Immunity: Reaching the
SHIPPEDstate grants a project immortality, freezing its health between 90-100 forever.
- Golden Showcase: A dedicated cinematic masonry grid that honors
SHIPPEDsoftware, featuring rich GSAP scroll choreography and floating idea fragments to celebrate projects that survived. - Generational Tracking: A React Flow visualizer maps the family tree of a project, tracking its descendants and lineage depth across multiple resurrections.
- Interactive Unlock Sequence: A scroll-driven GSAP animation physically "unlocks" a glowing 3D-styled vault containing archived project memories.
- Digital Relics: Creators can bury final messages, markdown readmes, and frozen roadmaps inside their projects.
- Discovery: Future developers who resurrect the project will uncover these sealed capsules via a drag-and-drop React Flow canvas interface.
- Deep Context: Every project page features an AI Chatbot (powered by Llama 3.3 70B via Groq) that has consumed the project's entire history, README, engagement metrics, lineage depth, and timeline.
- Immersive Persona: The AI acts as a cinematic narrator of the Code Afterlife, refusing to break character while answering technical questions about the codebase's legacy.
- Automated Chronicles: Background cron jobs sync with your GitHub repositories and recalculate project health scores daily (staggered at 9:00 AM and 12:00 PM IST to prevent API rate limits), with a manual fetch override available every 6 hours.
- Cinematic Summaries: The AI generates extremely concise, atmospheric summaries (max 30 words) of your latest commits to build an automated timeline.
- Epitaphs: When a project dies, the AI generates a poetic death reason.
- Forking from the Grave: Any user can resurrect a
DEADproject. - Live App Links: Owners can attach an optional deployed URL so visitors can open the running app directly from the project page and screenshot lightbox.
- Community Signals: Vote "Will Ship / Will Die" on active projects.
The platform is engineered with obsessive attention to frontend performance, cinematic rendering, and complex state management:
- Procedural 3D Generation: The Graveyard Canvas utilizes
Three.jsand custom vertex/fragment shaders to generate infinite noise-based terrain, dynamic grass blades (rendering 12,000+ instanced meshes efficiently), and rolling ground fog that evolves over time. - Advanced State Machines & Health Algorithms: A rigorous state-machine tracks projects from
BORN->ACTIVE->STALLED->DEAD(orSHIPPED). A mathematical health calculator evaluates GitHub commit consistency, month-over-month momentum, and applies specific exponential decays based on project states. - Performant Visual Choreography: Built with
GSAP ScrollTriggerandFramer Motion, the landing page executes heavy parallax, scroll-scrubbed vault unlocks, and SVG path drawing with near-zero JavaScript RAF (Request Animation Frame) costs by offloading complex floating animations to pure CSS where possible. - Generative AI Narratives: Connected to LLaMA-3.3-70B-Versatile via the Groq API, the
ai-pulseengine synthesizes raw GitHub commit histories and Markdown READMEs into poetic, 30-word cinematic observations, bringing dead projects back to life emotionally.
| Layer | Technology |
|---|---|
| Core | Next.js 16 (App Router), React 19 |
| State | React Hooks + Server Actions |
| Styling | Tailwind CSS v4, clsx, tailwind-merge |
| Motion | Framer Motion, GSAP, React Three Fiber (3D Elements) |
| UI/UX | Lenis (Smooth Scrolling), Lucide React (Icons) |
| Visuals | React Flow (Lineage Trees) |
| Layer | Technology |
|---|---|
| Runtime | Node.js, Next.js API Routes |
| Database | PostgreSQL (Neon), Prisma ORM 6 |
| Auth | NextAuth.js v5 (Auth.js) |
| Validation | Zod |
| AI | Groq SDK (Llama 3.3 70B Versatile), Vercel AI SDK |
| Resend | |
| Testing | Vitest (Unit and State Machine Testing) |
Code Afterlife/
├── prisma/ # Database schema (PostgreSQL) and seeders
├── public/ # Static assets
├── src/
│ ├── actions/ # Next.js Server Actions (Mutations)
│ ├── app/ # App Router (Pages, API routes, Layouts)
│ ├── components/ # UI Components (ProjectChatbot, Timeline, etc.)
│ ├── config/ # Global configs (Health math constraints)
│ ├── lib/ # Core logic (AI Pulse, State Machine)
│ ├── services/ # Complex Backend Orchestration
│ ├── types/ # TypeScript definitions
│ └── __tests__/ # Vitest Test Suites
├── vitest.config.ts # Testing configuration
├── README.md # This file
├── DOCUMENTATION.md # Deep technical architecture
└── package.json # Dependencies & Scripts
- Node.js v20+
- PostgreSQL database
- Groq API Key (for AI features)
- GitHub OAuth App (for authentication)
- GitHub Personal Access Token (for fetching commits)
-
Clone the repository
git clone https://github.com/HiteshShonak/code-afterlife.git cd code-afterlife -
Install Dependencies
npm install
-
Configure Environment Variables Create a
.env.localfile based on.env.sample. View DOCUMENTATION.md for the full list of required and optional keys. -
Initialize Database
npm run db:push npm run db:seed
-
Start Development Server
npm run dev
Access the app at
http://localhost:3000
| Feature | Implementation Details |
|---|---|
| State Machine | Rigid transition validation (src/lib/state-machine.ts) ensuring DEAD projects can only be resurrected to ACTIVE, and SHIPPED projects are completely immutable. |
| Health Calculator | Dynamic algorithm that factors momentum, 45-day consistency, and activity against a 50-commit cap. It dynamically caps scores by state, including a STALLED ceiling of 60 and automatic DEAD decay. |
| AI & Health Crons | Two staggered background workers execute daily: /api/health/recalculate runs at 9:00 AM IST to decay inactive projects, and /api/cron/ai-pulse runs at 12:00 PM IST to synthesize fresh commit timelines. Separating them prevents GitHub API rate-limit collisions. |
| Page | Route | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Landing | / |
Thematic landing page showcasing the graveyard |
| Dashboard | /dashboard |
User portal to manage living and resurrected projects |
| Explore | /explore |
Browse and filter projects by their lifecycle state |
| Search | /search |
Weighted SQL search by tech stack and title |
| Project View | /project/[slug] |
Comprehensive project timeline, lineage, and AI chat |
| Graveyard | /graveyard |
Dedicated 3D feed for abandoned (DEAD) projects |
| Lineage | /lineage/[slug] |
Interactive visual family tree of resurrections |
For full details on the health math algorithms, rigorous state machine constraints, API routes, cron jobs, and architectural patterns, please read our comprehensive DOCUMENTATION.md.
This project explores the intersection of open-source legacy and artificial intelligence. Contributions, bug reports, and feature requests are welcome.
This project is licensed under the MIT License. See the LICENSE file for details.
© 2026 Code Afterlife. Built with ❤️ by Hitesh Sharma.