I participated in a hackathon hosted in Seattle, focused on AI agents.
The whole thing was pretty open-ended, we could build whatever we wanted within 6 hours. It was kinda intense but super fun!What We BuiltI teamed up with Goldwayne and Bharat to create this thing we called "Shadow Agent" basically a productivity assistant for macOS that watches your screen and takes actions to keep you focused and productive.
We had big plans for it like notifications blocker, focus timer, reminders, tab manager, app blocker, and even an insights dashboard. However, time flew quick(we spent lot of time debugging) but still, with only just 6 hours in hand, we managed to ship two core features: the notifications blocker (turns on Do Not Disturb mode) and a focus timer with reminders (gives you a nudge when you get distracted).
The Cool Stuff I LearnedThe hackathon was a good experience because I picked up some new concepts and different ways to work with AI. I usually have this workflow with Cursor (an AI coding tool) where I discuss the project, come up with phases, and ask for explanations before and after implementation of each phase, Then I'd copy all that to my Notion page for reference.But then Goldwayne L. taught me something that made me think "damn, why didn't I think of that?" He suggested asking the AI to create a project.md and output.md file. Basically, the AI writes down all the phases in project.md, and when implementing stuff, it references this file. And output.md is just where it updates what it's done so you can check it anytime. This is actually smart. thanks Wayne!
This project is actually something I like to work on in my free time, so I'm planning to keep working on it and eventually ship a fully developed macOS app with all those features we initially planned. I'm pretty excited about where this could go!Oh, and btw, I drove from Vancouver to Seattle to attend this hackathon. It was a fun good two hour drive, totally worth it for the experience!Overall, I'm pretty stoked about what we managed to build in such a short time, and I learned some cool new tricks working with AI. Definitely a weekend well spent!