Causes of death

What the scanner can read from a git history, how much to trust each verdict, and what each one means if the user wants to resurrect. The scanner reports every cause that matches; the first one listed is the primary. Always quote the evidence, not just the label.

shiny_object — killed by a newer project

Signal: another repo the user owns had its first commit within 14 days of this repo's last commit. The killer is named in the evidence; when several newer projects qualify, the nearest in time gets the blame. Confidence: high that the timeline is real; medium that it's causal. Two projects can share a death week by coincidence — but when the same user shows this pattern three times, it's not coincidence. Resurrection angle: usually the healthiest corpses. Nothing was wrong with the project; attention just moved. Check whether the killer is also dead — chains of three or four are common and worth showing the user.

deploy_fear — finished but never shipped

Signal: README written, 20+ commits, real code — and no deploy config anywhere. The work was done. The shipping never happened. Confidence: high on the facts, but verify the intent: some projects are libraries or scripts that were never meant to deploy. A CLI tool with no vercel.json isn't fearful, it's a CLI tool. Resurrection angle: the best candidates on the board — they score high on pulse because the work is already done. What remains is small and boring — deploy config, a domain, hitting publish — which is exactly what an agent is for. This is also the death most worth naming honestly in the report: building was never the problem.

payments_wall / auth_wall

Signal: the final commits before death touch payment code (stripe, billing, checkout) or auth code (oauth, login, sessions). Confidence: high — this one is written right into where the history stops. Resurrection angle: the wall that killed it in 2024 may not exist in 2026. Managed auth and payment links have eaten most of the integration pain. If the same wall appears on 2-3 corpses, tell the user directly: the wall isn't moving, so the approach has to — resurrect with the managed version of whatever they were hand-rolling.

boilerplate_wall — died configuring

Signal: 60%+ of all file touches in the history were config files. The project spent its life setting up tooling and never met its actual problem. Confidence: high. The ratio doesn't lie. Resurrection angle: don't resurrect the repo; resurrect the idea in a fresh scaffold. The corpse contains almost nothing worth exhuming — that's the point of the diagnosis. Ten minutes with a modern starter beats a week of archaeology in someone's webpack config.

rewrite_spiral

Signal: two or more rewrite/migrate/port commits in the history. The project kept being rebuilt instead of finished. Confidence: medium — commit messages are noisy. Read a couple before asserting it. Resurrection angle: the danger is obvious: resurrection becomes rewrite number four. If the user wants this one back, the plan must freeze the stack in step 1 and forbid migrations until it ships.

scope_explosion

Signal: 100+ files, many top-level directories, no deploy config, and a lifespan over a month. It grew instead of shipping. Confidence: medium — monorepos and generated code inflate file counts. Check what the files are before repeating the verdict. Resurrection angle: don't resurrect the project; resurrect one feature. Ask the user what the 20% was that they actually wanted, extract that, ship that. The other 80 files stay in the grave.

slow_fade

Signal: the gap before the final commit was 3x+ the median gap. No wall, no killer — commits just got further apart until they stopped. Confidence: high on the shape, low on the why. The history shows the fade, not the reason. Resurrection angle: interest died, and interest is the one thing an agent can't ship. Ask the user whether they still care before planning anything. "No" is a fine answer and worth saying out loud — closure is also a feature of the report.

unknown — natural causes

Signal: none of the above fired. Confidence: n/a — it's the absence of a verdict, not a verdict. Resurrection angle: the scanner can't see it, but you can: read the README and the last few commits and form your own view. One-day burst projects land here a lot; so do experiments that answered their question and were correctly never reopened. Not every dead project is a failure.