We Love Bolt
Let’s start with this: we love Bolt.
Bolt.new is, in our opinion, the best generative AI coding platform out there. It lets you build with just about any tool, including our favorite, Vue.js. So when the hackathon came around, we thought: we got this. Two senior devs on a generative AI platform? We're going to crush it.
Falling Into the Trap
It’s easy to get carried away. Even as seasoned developers.
You see the AI generate your first draft and think, “Whoa. I can do anything.”
But then come the edits.
The AI starts losing context. It deletes files. It adds new ones you didn’t ask for. It updates your design in ways you never intended. Suddenly, you're taking two steps forward and three steps back.
We know how to build and deploy apps. But we didn’t know how to prompt effectively. We weren’t AI whisperers. And we ran straight into the limits of what these platforms are good at (and what they’re not).
Our Overconfident Scope
Our project? A short-form video generator.
We planned:
- Authenticated and unauthenticated flows
- Three different AI models
- A multi-step UX
- Business logic for tracking token usage
- Stripe-powered credit packs
Why? Because we were overconfident.
In the end, we cut our losses. And we weren’t alone. The hackathon Discord was full of ambitious devs like us. Talented folks who hit the same wall: scope vs. time vs. prompt engineering.
The Real Winners
The real winners?
Honestly… it’s anyone who launched something they’re proud of.
Most people don’t even try. They get stuck in planning, overthinking, imposter syndrome, or waiting for the “perfect” version. So if you shipped anything—even a weird little app that made someone stop and look—you already beat the game.
We want to shout out the devs who submitted small, finished, engaging projects. Some of them totally nailed the kind of creative weirdness we stand for at Chaos Byte.
So we reached out to a few and asked if we could promote their projects on our site. You can check them out here!
What We Learned
- Start small. Like, really small.
- Make sure your project is fun—even if it’s not “impressive”
- Prompting is its own skill. You’ll need to experiment and iterate
- Don’t hide your app behind a boring login screen. Let people play.
Looking Ahead
We're excited to see who wins. If we had to guess? It'll be something small, polished, and delightful.
Not some broken SaaS behind a wall of auth. No one cares about that anymore.
We came away from the hackathon encouraged. The boring is fading fast—and in its place is something a little weirder, a little more human.
Go build something fun. And if you join a hackathon? Don’t be like us.