🪦 Project Graveyard Agent Skill

Every developer has the folder. Twenty-something dead projects, each abandoned for reasons nobody wrote down.

This skill reads the git history of every abandoned project on your machine and answers three questions:

Why did each one die? Evidence, not vibes. The last commits touch Stripe files: it died at the payments wall. Another repo's first commit lands three days after this one's last: the killer gets named.

What's your pattern? Your projects die at day 19. Four of six were abandoned within 48 hours of starting something new.

Which one still has a pulse? Somewhere in that folder is a project that's 90% done: built, documented, never shipped. This finds it, checks what got easier since it died, and writes the short list of steps between it and a URL.

A representative scan (invented projects, real classifier verdicts). Your agent turns it into the funeral: an epitaph per corpse, your patterns named, and an offer to start resurrecting the strongest pulse right now. Yours will hurt more.

<img width="1672" height="941" alt="ChatGPT Image Jul 9, 2026, 06_46_05 PM" src="https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/b80456c7-cd6f-49d8-adcf-641230d4c601" />

What it detects

Cause of death, read from git history:

Cause	How it knows
shiny object	Another repo you own had its first commit within days of this one's last. The killer is named.
deploy fear	README done, 20+ commits, real code, zero deploy config. It worked. It never shipped.
payments / auth wall	The final commits touch stripe/billing or oauth/login code.
boilerplate wall	60%+ of all file changes were config files. It died configuring.
rewrite spiral	Multiple rewrite/migrate commits; rebuilt instead of finished.
scope explosion	100+ files, no deploy config. It grew instead of shipping.
slow fade	Commit gaps stretched until they stopped. No wall, no killer; it drifted.

It also separates the finished (deployed, pushed, documented; done, not abandoned) from the unversioned (no git, so no autopsy). Then it ranks the dead by pulse, how close each is to shipping, and the agent takes over:

• Autopsy interview: ambiguous deaths get a question; git evidence is marked (forensic), your answers (confirmed).
• World-check: before prescribing a dig, it checks what changed since the death: the API that now has an SDK, the model that's 20x cheaper.
• Resurrection: a ≤7-step plan ending at shipped, and an offer to start on step 1 right now.
• Relapse watch: resurrections are recorded (--state + --mark-resurrected); every later scan reports whether the patient is holding.
• Necromancer mode: ask your agent to build something new and it checks the graveyard first; you may have built 60% of it in 2024.

Install (10 seconds)

npx skills add https://github.com/Shubhamsaboo/awesome-llm-apps/tree/main/agent_skills/project-graveyard

The skills CLI installs it into whatever agents you have (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Copilot, Antigravity, and others); or copy this folder into your agent's skills dir. Then: "run the graveyard on ~/dev and ~/projects".

Standalone, no agent required:

python3 project-graveyard/scripts/graveyard.py ~/dev ~/projects

Scope and privacy

Everything runs locally: one plain-Python file, stdlib only, zero network calls, read-only. It reads git metadata (commit dates, messages, filenames), never your code's contents. Name folders and it scans only those; given none, it checks a fixed list of usual project spots (DEFAULT_ROOTS, line 30 of the script), never "everything on your machine." Want to post your report? --redact swaps project names for project-1..n.

Prove it works before installing, from a clone of this repo:

python3 agent_skills/evals/project-graveyard/test_graveyard.py   # 16 checks, ~10 seconds

Limits: no git means no autopsy (counted, not diagnosed). "Dead" is 45+ days silent, tunable with --days. Tested on macOS and Linux.

Files

project-graveyard/                  # ← this is all that gets copied
├── SKILL.md                        # agent instructions: report format, epitaph rules, resurrection protocol
├── README.md                       # this file
├── scripts/graveyard.py            # scanner + autopsy + pulse ranking (Python 3.8+, stdlib, offline)
└── references/causes-of-death.md   # the taxonomy: signals, confidence, resurrection strategy per cause

Part of awesome-llm-apps · Apache-2.0 · Last verified: July 2026