TouchGrass AI — An Open-Source AI Outdoor Challenge Generator 🌿

This is a submission for the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 1: Touch Grass

What I Built

I built TouchGrass AI, a web application that uses open-weight AI to encourage people to step away from their screens and spend time outdoors.

Users choose an outdoor activity, how much time they have, and their current mood. TouchGrass AI then generates a short personalized outdoor challenge.

For example, users can choose:

• 🚶 Walking
• 🏃 Running
• 🌱 Gardening
• 🐦 Bird watching
• 🥾 Hiking
• 📸 Outdoor photography

The goal is simple: instead of using AI to keep people on a screen, use AI to give them a reason to leave the screen and go outside. 🌿

The project is designed for anyone who wants a simple push to spend more time outdoors.

Demo

GitHub repository:
[https://github.com/rachana458/Touchgrass-ai]

Code

GitHub:
[https://github.com/rachana458/Touchgrass-ai]

The repository contains the complete Next.js application, including the AI integration and user interface.

How I Built It

I built TouchGrass AI with:

• Next.js
• React
• TypeScript
• Tailwind CSS
• Transformers.js
• Qwen2.5-0.5B-Instruct

The AI component uses the open-weight Qwen2.5-0.5B-Instruct model through Transformers.js.

The application sends the user's selected activity, available time, and mood to the model and asks it to generate one short outdoor activity idea.

I then use the generated idea inside a structured challenge:

1. Start with a few minutes of gentle movement.
2. Follow the AI-generated outdoor activity.
3. Finish by enjoying the outdoors.

I intentionally kept the AI output short because smaller open-weight models can produce unpredictable results when asked to generate long structured responses.

The application therefore uses the AI for the creative part while the application controls the final structure.

Why Does Open Innovation Matter?

Open innovation makes experimentation with AI much more accessible.

For this project, I was able to experiment with an open-weight model instead of depending on a paid proprietary AI API.

Using Transformers.js also allowed me to explore running the model directly in the web application.

This makes it possible to build small AI experiences without requiring a separate paid AI service for every generation.

More importantly, open AI tools give developers the freedom to experiment with ideas that might otherwise be difficult or expensive to prototype.

For TouchGrass AI, that made it possible to explore a simple question:

Can we use AI to encourage people to spend less time with technology?

My Agent Session

I did not use DevRelay for this project, so I am leaving this optional section out.

Prize Categories

I am submitting TouchGrass AI for the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 1: Touch Grass.