I Thought I Could Build It in 9 Days I Was Wrong

9 days.
7 Codex accounts.
Multiple free credits exhausted.
Replit credits gone.
API limits.
An old laptop with 8GB RAM and basically no storage left.
Barely any sleep.
And somehow… I still kept building.

I started Hack Hydra, a 9-day HydraDB hackathon, thinking I had enough time and resources to build something ambitious.

Spoiler: I absolutely did not. 😅

I started with Codex and burned through the free credits across all 7 of my accounts.

Then I moved to Replit and used those credits too.

At that point, my backend was around 80% done.

Frontend?

Still pending.

Overall?

Maybe 40% of the project was actually complete.

And I had basically no credits left anywhere.

Then I found Freebuff, which gave me 6 free sections every day. That genuinely helped me keep moving.

But then came the API limits.

And this is where I started realizing how badly I had planned this.

Claude kept warning me:

“You’re over-scoping.”

“This probably isn’t buildable in the available time.”

And honestly, my mindset was basically:

“Fuck man, I know. Your job is to follow my commands, not tell me what’s possible.”

I thought this was vibe coding.

I thought if I could describe what I wanted, AI would just build it.

And building the code itself actually wasn't the hardest part.

Debugging was.

I’d say almost 70% of my time went into debugging.

Checking logs.

Reading errors.

Figuring out why an API wasn't working.

Testing the backend manually.

Fixing one thing.

Breaking another.

Running it again.

Then there was the design work.

Then connecting everything together.

Then testing again.

A feature that sounds like:

«“This should be easy.”»

can turn into:

«“Why the fuck is this returning an error?”»

for the next few hours.

And I kept adding more.

More features.

More complexity.

More things the project “should” have.

I wasn't just building a project anymore.

I was building something that was way too complicated for the time, credits, hardware and resources I actually had.

Then my laptop started fighting me too.

It's 5 years old.

8GB RAM.

Storage completely full.

Running the project and manually testing the backend on it was painful.

And somehow I kept going.

Then the final 2 days arrived.

And almost nothing was working.

No proper demo video.

Still debugging.

Still fixing.

Still trying.

One day left.

Still nothing.

Then the final 12 hours.

Barely any sleep.

At that point, I finally stopped trying to convince myself that everything would magically come together.

I started accepting the situation.

I went to sleep.

Woke up.

Opened my laptop.

And after 9 days of hard work…

my app was broken.

That hurt.

I couldn't even make the demo video.

I didn't finish what I imagined on Day 1.

But after accepting that, something interesting happened.

I started looking for the next hackathon.

And while doing that, I found an idea for my next project.

That's when I realized this 9-day journey actually gave me something much more useful than another finished project.

I learned how I need to build.

Next time:

1. Plan properly before starting.

Not just “I have 9 days, let's build.”

I need to understand what is actually possible with the time, hardware, APIs and resources I have.

1. Get the core project working early.

The goal should be to have something working well before the deadline, not to still be building the foundation on the final day.

1. Start the demo video when I'm around 90% done.

Not at the last minute when everything is on fire.

1. Add scope one thing at a time.

Get one feature working.

Then ask: Do I actually have enough time for another?

If yes, add it.

If not, ship what already works.

1. Stop treating AI like magic.

Vibe coding makes building faster.

It doesn't remove debugging.

It doesn't remove architecture.

It doesn't remove testing.

It doesn't remove design.

And it definitely doesn't remove time constraints.

I've done a 50-day buildathon.

I've done week-long hackathons.

I've done 3 months of 11Labs hackathons.

But this 9-day hackathon taught me something different.

Sometimes the biggest lesson doesn't come from successfully shipping.

Sometimes it comes from spending 9 days finding out exactly why you couldn't ship.

I got cooked by this hackathon. 🔥

But I also learned a lot.

And now I have an idea for the next one.

Hopefully this time…

I actually plan before I start cooking. 😭