I Hosted My First (Vibe) Hackathon This Week

From Document Explainers to Quantum Explorations, We Had It All

On Monday night, I hosted a “vibe hackathon”—a hackathon where everyone who attended built something using an AI tool like Lovable, Bolt, Replit, etc. We had about 25 people show up, and it resulted in a pretty amazing night. We spent the first hour getting to know each other over pizza, some veggie trays, and Arnold Palmers. At 6:45 PM, I welcomed everyone to the hackathon and explained how it was going to work. At 7 PM sharp, people split up and started hacking with their tool of choice.

After an hour, I had everyone send me their production-ready links, and then we demoed what we built, one by one. There were some teams and some solo projects, so we had about 10–12 projects in the end.

This hackathon did have a prize at the end. What is that prize, you may ask? A feature in this newsletter! Over 5,500 people are on this list, with a 35% open rate. A large chunk of this list consists of influential people in tech. What better prize than getting their projects in front of 2,000–2,500 smart tech folks who will open this email today?

Admittedly, at the hackathon, we did an audience vote to determine who built the coolest product. In hindsight, I think this was probably the wrong way to do it. There were five products that stood out above the rest in my view. Those will be the ones I feature.

Also remember, all of these were built from scratch in AN HOUR! Think about that as you go through the projects. It’s pretty impressive.

My Favorite Projects From The Hackathon

KnowledgeGap

Tell KnowledgeGap a topic you want to learn more about and some things you already know, and it will identify areas you may not be aware of yet. Below is an example of how it works. Play around with it here.

Motivational Coach

This one is pretty wild. Tell the system a goal of yours, and then you can actually call an AI that will motivate you to complete it. You can set a timeframe and choose a tone for the AI (Supportive, Challenging, etc.). Built using Replit Agent and ElevenLabs. Play with it here.

DocuClarity

This is probably the most useful tool built during the hackathon. Upload a document, and it will tell you what it actually means. It highlights confusing words and raises red flags if it detects any. The site was built on Cursor. Play around with it here.

All Paths Explored

This one is definitely the most creative of the bunch. It’s a visual exploration of quantum paths. I have no idea how he built it, but I know he did it in Lovable. Very impressive. Play around here.

Spooky Ghost Challenge

This game was built by a family—a dad and his two young kids. The idea is that you’re stuck in a spooky house and must explore. Ghosts pop up frequently, and you can defeat them by answering math problems or riddles. It’s pretty well done and impressive that all of this was built with Lovable. Play around with it here.

The Summary? Successful Hackathon!

What a fun night! I definitely plan on hosting more of these. Here are some more pics I took as people were building.

Ok, that’s it! See ya’ll later.

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