Every AI app right now looks exactly the same: a clean white background, a polite assistant, and a text box. It’s getting a little boring.
I saw the Build with MeDo Hackathon (hosted by Baidu) was running this weekend, and I wanted to enter their "Surprise Us" category with something completely unhinged.
So, I built Noir AI: Dream Detective.
The Idea
The premise is pretty simple. You wake up from a weird dream (like, "I was running through a subway being chased by a giant waffle"). Instead of asking ChatGPT to analyze it, you sit down in an "Interrogation Room" with Det. Jack Malone.
He’s a cynical 1940s AI detective. He uses old slang, he’s impatient, and he basically roasts you while trying to figure out what your subconscious is doing.
The Cool Tech Part
I really didn't want to just build a chat wrapper. The app had to feel interactive.
So, I built a dynamic Evidence Board. As you're typing your dream into the chat, the AI is quietly running entity extraction in the background. If you mention that "giant waffle," the app automatically pushes a visual sticky note to a corkboard UI on the right side of your screen.
No page reloads, no clicking a "generate board" button. Just real-time state updates reacting to the chat context.
How I built it (without writing the code)
I built the entire thing using MeDo, Baidu's generative app builder.
I'm usually pretty skeptical of "prompt-to-app" tools, but this was actually wild. Instead of manually messing around with CSS to get the vintage look, I literally just prompted the MeDo engine: "Give me a split-screen layout, vintage typewriter fonts, charcoal and sepia colors, and a corkboard on the right."
It spat out a surprisingly solid React/CSS layout.
The trickiest part was wiring the logic. I had to tune the prompt so that the underlying ERNIE model wouldn't just reply with 1940s dialogue, but would also tag the weird nouns in my dream so the frontend could render them as visual clues.
Go get interrogated
Hackathons are the best excuse to build weird stuff you'd normally never have time for. If you want to see how far natural language app builders have come, definitely check out the MeDo platform.
🕵️♂️ Try the app here: https://app-bohuz3w65ukh.appmedo.com/
🏆 Read my Devpost submission: https://devpost.com/software/noir-ai-dream-detective
Drop your weirdest dream in the comments below. I want to see what kind of evidence board the detective makes for you. 👇
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