My roommate kept stealing the 7 PM court slot, so I built an AI warden to settle our wars.

Achintya singh — Sun, 04 Oct 2026 18:46:03 +0000

This is a submission for the Hacktoberfest Weekend Challenge: Build for a Friend

What I Built

🏸 My hostel mates were treating the badminton sign-up sheet like a death note, so I built an AI dictator to stop the bloodshed

If you've ever set foot in a college hostel, you know the physical sign-up sheet for the badminton court is less of a schedule and more of a psychological thriller. Someone writes "7 PM - Me," someone else aggressively scribbles it out, slathers three layers of whiteout over it, and suddenly a casual rally turns into a full-scale hallway turf war.

My floor was descending into absolute lawlessness. People were forging signatures, hiding pens, and nearly throwing hands over a court slot. Pen and paper had failed us. Democracy had failed us.

So, instead of getting accidentally clocked in the face with a graphite racket, I built Hostel Nexus—an unyielding, AI-powered hostel warden that brings absolute, emotionless judicial tyranny back to campus living.

What Hostel Nexus actually does:

The Supreme Court of Campus Sports: Instead of letting roommates scream at each other in the corridor at midnight, they submit their dramatic grievances straight to an AI Warden powered by local Gemma.
Zero-Drama Verdicts: The AI doesn't care that your roommate "called dibs" or that they shared their snacks with you yesterday. It weighs the data, drops a binding final sentence, and shuts down the debate permanently.
Apocalypse-Proof Reliability: Even when cloud deployment serverless functions tried to throw tantrums, our graceful offline fallback logic ensured the AI Warden kept dropping judgments like a cold-hearted digital overlord.

Demo -

hacktoberfest-1.vercel.app

video demo -

Code

Achintyasingh412 / hacktoberfest

AI-Powered Hostel Management with a Local, Open-Weight AI Warden

"My roommate Arjun and I kept fighting over the badminton court. Every evening, 40 students raced to book 2 courts between 7–10 PM, and the group chat turned into a war zone. So I built Hostel Nexus — with a local Gemma-powered AI warden that arbitrates fairly, so nobody has to."

📖 The Story Behind Hostel Nexus

Campus hostel life revolves around shared amenities — badminton courts, table tennis blades, basketballs, and late-night study lounge speakers. But peak evening hours (7:00 PM – 10:00 PM) consistently turn into booking chaos. With no impartial authority on site, WhatsApp group chats degrade into shouting matches over slot claims, equipment hoarding, and curfew violations.

Hostel Nexus solves this human problem with technology. It combines a real-time 5:00 PM – 11:00 PM booking matrix, a weekly 4-credit quota system, and an automated Local Gemma AI…

View on GitHub

How I Built It

Open-Source AI & Architecture Used:
Open-Weight Model: Gemma (running locally via Ollama).

Inference & Execution: Local inference via Ollama, allowing students and hostel wardens to query the model directly on local hardware without incurring cloud token costs or latency.

Frameworks & Stack: Built with a Next.js frontend and backend API routes, deployed on Vercel, paired with a custom-engineered graceful-fallback architecture.

How the Project is Built Around It:
Hostel Nexus is built entirely around Gemma acting as an Impartial AI Warden.

Autonomous Dispute Arbitration: Instead of relying on manual sign-up sheets that lead to hallway arguments and crossed-out badminton court slots, students feed their scheduling conflicts directly into the web app.

Local Intelligence for Campus Living: The application leverages Gemma to analyze time constraints, review competing claims, and output a strict, emotionless, and binding verdict.

Robust Production Fallback: Because local models (Ollama) run on localhost:11434, cloud-hosted environments like Vercel serverless functions cannot directly query local endpoints. To solve this, we built a smart fallback layer that seamlessly switches to pre-scripted demo states when offline, ensuring the AI Warden's judgment is always available for evaluation without crashing.

Why Does Open Innovation Matter?

Why Open Innovation Matters for Hostel Nexus:
Open innovation and open-weight models like Gemma were the absolute backbone of Hostel Nexus. Without them, building a decentralized, student-first campus arbiter would have been practically impossible using a closed-source corporate API.

Here is what open innovation made possible that a closed API simply couldn't:

Zero Cost for Student Budgets: Closed-source APIs (like OpenAI or Anthropic) charge per-token fees. In a college hostel setting where students are already low on cash, charging a subscription or per-query fee every time two roommates argue over a badminton court slot is completely unviable. Open innovation made AI 100% free and accessible to run locally on student hardware.

Radical Privacy & Data Sovereignty: Sending sensitive campus schedules, room numbers, and personal student disputes to a third-party closed server raises major privacy concerns. Running Gemma locally means student data stays where it belongs—under local control, without being harvested by a corporate monolith.

Zero Rate Limits and Vendor Lock-in: Closed APIs come with strict rate limits, sudden pricing changes, and unpredictable downtime. By leveraging an open-weight model via Ollama, we had total freedom to customize the AI Warden's strict, impartial persona, iterate rapidly during the hackathon sprint, and experiment without hitting a corporate paywall or API block.

Built with AI Collaboration (Best Use of Entire)
To build Hostel Nexus in record time during this hackathon, I didn't code in a silo—I collaborated closely with an AI agent as my co-pilot to architect, debug, and refine the entire application from scratch.

Here is a look at how our agent sessions and interactive problem-solving shaped the final project:

Solving the Cloud vs. Local Dilemma: When deploying our Next.js frontend to Vercel, we hit a major engineering wall: cloud serverless functions couldn't query local machine endpoints (localhost:11434 for Ollama/Gemma). Through our agent sessions, we designed and implemented a graceful-fallback architecture that automatically detects unreachable endpoints and switches to pre-scripted demo states, ensuring zero downtime for judges.

Crafting the Narrative & Tone: The agent helped pivot our project framing from a dry, boring technical feature list into a human-centric story focused on real-world college hostel roommate disputes over badminton court bookings.

Streamlining Secret Handling: We used agent-assisted debugging sessions to cleanly separate sensitive API credentials—like our ElevenLabs voice synthesis keys—from the source code, securing them properly via Vercel environment variables.

By leaning on transparent, iterative agent collaboration, we turned a complex offline-to-cloud architecture challenge into a smooth, production-ready submission!

Prize Categories

Best Use of Gemma — Because your app is built entirely around local Gemma acting as an impartial AI Warden via Ollama.

Best Use of Entire — Because you leveraged transparent agent sessions and AI collaboration workflows to architect, build, and debug the application.

DEV Community: Achintya singh