The First Build Hackathon
Build, verify and demo one useful product
The final session is a hackathon built for completion. Solo builders and small teams choose one narrow problem, define the finish line before coding, then use mentors and AI agents to get a working product across it. The room ends with live demos and honest build notes.
Dates TBD — evening workshops followed by a longer capstone hackathon at Workuity Biltmore. Join Discord or follow the Meetup calendar for the next cohort.
Or join the waitlist — the dates come to you.
Venue sponsor: Workuity. Format: the host builds live on screen. Bring a laptop and work along, or just watch — nobody is put on the spot.
Why this session
The concepts only become durable when you use them under a deadline. A constrained capstone forces the decisions real product work requires: what not to build, what must be tested and what evidence makes a demo credible.
What we cover
- 01
Brief and team formation
Choose one user, one painful job and one core journey. Lock the definition of done before the first agent starts.
- 02
Architecture check
Sketch the interface, data and integrations; identify secrets, external dependencies and the riskiest assumption.
- 03
Build in vertical slices
Ship the smallest end-to-end path first, commit it, then add only what strengthens the core outcome.
- 04
Mentor and verification rounds
Get product and engineering feedback, run the checks that match your risk, and test the app as a stranger would.
- 05
Deploy freeze
Put the final build online, capture the repository state and stop adding features while there is still time to fix the demo path.
- 06
Live demos
Show the problem, perform the core journey on the live product and share one thing the agent got wrong that you caught.
You leave with
A focused product or reviewable build, evidence that the core user journey works and a short live-demo format you can reuse.
To follow along
A laptop, your repository and an idea you can explain in two sentences. Teams can form at the event; existing products are welcome if the capstone adds and verifies a meaningful new workflow.
Afterward
Nothing is required. It compounds if you run the same work on your own product. The suggested output:
04-hackathon/ — live URL, final brief, verification evidence, demo notes and a short retrospective.
Everything is open source. Missed the session? It's archived in Discord.
The session kit
Slides, a follow-along guide and skill files. Free to download, room or no room.
The community online
Recaps, archive links, questions between sessions, everyone else's work in progress.