Last week, I went to two hackathon events to check out how others are using the latest technology and their creativity to build stuff. Let me share some things I've noticed, and what I've built.
The first event was a "Vibe Coding Olympics" with about ~50 people and a simple premise: Build a working prototype for a service that improves the lifes of bike delivery couriers, in 20min, using any tool. Judged on vibes alone.
By my surprise I was one of the two winners of that round with a mindfulness app designed around their specific working environment. Have a look: https://rideflow-zen.netlify.app/landing.html
The final was a 10min on-stage head-to-head live coding with the challenge: Reimagining instagram in the age of AI.
My co-competitor and me went into very different directions. While he envisoned AI-generated 'moments' created from user promptes, I went more tech-critical with a minimal interface that facilitates off-screen human interactions. Check it out here: https://be-elsewhere.netlify.app/
My take-aways:
- With vibe coding the crucial ingredient is your unique vibe that you bring to the project. Many participants just implemented the example mentioned by the organizers to explain the challenge.
- My setup with 1-2 Claude Code assistants seems to be also the most popular among participants. Note: have a backup tool (like Copilot) when your tokens run out midway in a screenshared live coding competition 🙈
- AI can't automate taste. The question I got consistently afterwards was how I made the interfaces pretty, and it basically comes down to intentionally cultivating base prompts (e.g. in CLAUDE.md) that capture your personal style and philosophies, and writing prompts in a non-generic voice that is your own.
- With most of the technical work being done automatically, prioritize genuine human-centered purpose, concept, and design. Too often I've overhead things like "you have to increase the dopamine, make it more sparkly" and "maximize engagement".
The second event had an interesting spin on this last point. This "Stupid Hackathon" prompted us to create something completly silly and uselses, making us thing about putting friction back into technology, and also to be playful and artistic.
So, I build a browser pluin that's essentially an Auto-Correct with a dial that goes from normal spellchecking up to AI-backed reinterpretation and eventually hallucination of whatever you write, but the dial goes also into the negative, introducing typos and at -10 garbeling it to total gibberish. Feel free to play around with it: https://github.com/rgutzen/over-correct
Top comments (0)