Can you win a hackathon by vibe coding it?

Abode Team — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 05:59:50 +0000

We're about to find out.

We built Abode, a full property management app connecting owners, handymen, and tenants in one place. Rather than letting AI turn the project into a big pile of slop, and since the hackathon required an intricate and well thought out backend, we decided on creating a detailed structure of the backend and hopefully minimizing the slop the AI produced. Hopefully in the future we can just make AI do all the work while we play video games and do whatever we want to do all day.

The problem nobody talks about

There's a whole class of property owner that the big players ignore completely.
Not the corporate landlords. Not the REITs. The family that inherited grandma's duplex. The guy who bought a small apartment building as a retirement investment. The mom who owns three units in her neighborhood and manages them herself between a full-time job and two kids.
These people are running their properties over text messages, spreadsheets, and gut instinct. A repair request comes in over iMessage. The handyman gets called on a personal cell. The invoice arrives as a photo of a handwritten note. Rent gets tracked in a Google Sheet that one person understands and nobody else can read.
And the kicker, if something goes wrong, they're personally liable. A missed maintenance request, a disputed payment, a he-said-she-said over whether a repair was approved — without a paper trail, they're exposed. The big property management companies have software that protects them. The small guys have texts.
That's who Abode is for.

What we built

Three roles, one app. Every interaction documented, every state transition tracked, nothing left to memory or goodwill.
A tenant files a maintenance request in the app, attaches a photo, and can see exactly where it stands at any time. No more "did you get my text?" An owner sees their whole portfolio in one dashboard, assigns the job to an available handyman, and approves the estimate before any work starts. The handyman can't mark a job complete without uploading proof. No "trust me, it's finished." The receipt is in the system before the job closes.
Rent and utilities are broken out by invoice, paid through the app, tracked automatically. Every property is on a live map. Notifications fire across all three roles the moment anything changes.
The whole thing runs on real infrastructure. AWS for the backend, Vercel for the frontend, Stripe for payments. It's not a prototype. It's built to run.

Why it matters

The big property management platforms are built for scale, hundreds of units, dedicated staff, enterprise contracts. Small owners either can't afford them or don't qualify. So they stay on texts and spreadsheets, exposed and disorganized, until something goes wrong.
Abode sits in that gap. Simple enough for someone managing three units on the side. Solid enough to actually protect them when it matters.
That's the whole idea.

DEV Community: Abode Team

Can you win a hackathon by vibe coding it?

H0Hackathon