From Wasting 9 Million Tokens to 3AM Panic: Building Datrix with Bolt.new

Zulekha Bibi — Tue, 22 Jul 2025 19:26:21 +0000

When I first saw the post about the World's Largest Hackathon by bolt.new, I knew I wanted in but, I didn’t want to go solo.

So I reached out to my two best friends:

Hamza (dev and also my partner-in-crime)
Narmeen (our Project Manager and also the person who keeps us sane)

We tossed around 2 different project ideas and spent a few days talking to people around us and finally decided to go with Datrix.

The Problem We Wanted to Solve

At her job, Narmeen kept seeing the same problem at every company she worked with:

Businesses drowning in unstructured data.

Invoices in 500 different formats
Emails stuffed with attachments no one opens
Excel sheets that look like five people made them without ever speaking to each other

It’s a mess. And worse? It’s manual.

She watched a massive textile supplier literally type out purchase orders by hand for hours. For huge brands like PrettyLittleThing and Boohoo.

So we decided to build Datrix — an AI-powered system that:

Reads and processes messy emails into structured data
Lets you chat with your data and feed it files for processing
Turns all that data into dashboards and charts, automatically

How Bolt.new Fit In (And Saved My Frontend Life)

I’ve always been a backend dev (although I worked full-stack).
Frontend? Not my thing.
Fancy animations? Absolutely not my thing.

So naturally, I decided to go all in and build a "cinematic scroll journey" for the Datrix landing page. You know the kind where floating icons fall into a box and then transforms into a table and then into charts while text fades in at the perfect moment.

Here’s what actually happened:
I spent 9 million tokens in Bolt trying to get that scroll sequence right.

I tried everything:

Asked Claude to write me a perfect system prompt
Gave it images of exactly what I wanted
Tried to get the raw code out of Claude (even Claude gave up)

Eventually, reality hit me and I told myself:
This is AI doing my frontend and this is a hackathon, not Pixar. I need to be realistic.

So I ditched the impossible scroll dream, built a more realistic landing page, and honestly? I’m still super happy with how it turned out (a very basic version of my scroll journey dream lol).

Once the theme was locked in, Bolt.new felt like magic.
I’d explain what I wanted to Claude, ask for a solid system prompt, feed that to Bolt, and boom! Frontend pages generated super quick! Sometimes I tweaked things, but most of the time it was ready to go.

The sticky analysis board using React Flow? Bolt nailed that on the first try. No notes.

Mid-Hackathon Meltdown (And Reddit Therapy)

Now for the real talk:
Midway through the hackathon, we basically gave up.

All three of us were buried in our full-time jobs.
At that point, Datrix was just:

A landing page
Login/signup
A plan in a Google Doc

We kept pinging each other like:
"Hey… are we still doing this?"
"Hmm, maybe catchup tomorrow or over the weekend?"

It got so bad, I posted on Reddit about how I always leave things unfinished.

That post blew up.
Hundreds of people told me to just finish the project even if it was one feature because sometimes you need to break the habit of quitting halfway.

So, I did.

The Final 5-Day Sprint

I pulled three all-nighters with Hamza to get Datrix done.
Meanwhile, Narmeen was compiling docs and chasing us for final footage.

We finished coding at around 5-6AM the day before submission deadline, sent everything to Narmeen, and she stitched together the demo video in 4 hours (on the last day).

The 3AM Deploy Panic

We submitted everything 3 hours before the deadline and thought we were safe.

Then, just for fun (and because I’m paranoid), I checked Netlify at 3AM.
THE LAST 10 COMMITS HAD FAILED.

At this point, the others were asleep thinking we were done. Meanwhile, I was whisper-swearing at my screen, frantically fixing build errors in the dark.

Luckily, Bolt extended the deadline by 3 hours and that literally saved us!

I fixed the deploy. Pushed again. It worked. Took a deep breath. Went to sleep.

A Few "Oh Wow" Moments

I never thought I could build UIs like this. Bolt.new made me feel like I had a magic wand for frontend work.
The Reddit Challenge: In the middle of our burnout, I randomly tried the Silly Sh!t Challenge just for fun. I didn’t even know Reddit had apps before this but somehow built that part in one shot. Highly recommend stress-building random side projects during a hackathon. Weirdly therapeutic.
The "Is this spam?" test: When I completed the integration of the spam checker agent, it wasn’t catching spam like we expected it to. We were drained. We’d almost quit. But Narmeen rewrote the prompt and said: "Last try. Push it." We jumped on a Google Meet, ran five back-to-back tests, all of us holding our breath. When the fifth test passed, we screamed. Like full-volume, no-holding-back screamed. After everything, that tiny win felt like winning the whole hackathon.

What I Learned

AI can’t build Marvel-level animations (yet). But it can help you build real, working apps fast (and good enough scroll journeys & animations).
Specialized agents > one agent that does everything.
Done is better than perfect. Even if it’s 3AM and you’re fixing Netlify deploys alone in the dark.
Ask for help when you’re stuck. Sometimes Reddit gives you the push you need.

Final Thoughts

This hackathon wasn’t just about building Datrix.
It was about proving to myself that I could actually finish something, even when it got messy, stressful, and what not.

And yeah, maybe my cinematic scroll dream will have to wait but for now? Datrix works.

And I’m really proud of what we built.

DEV Community: Zulekha Bibi

Took vibe coding to the next level and built datrix for bolt.new's hackathon!