Uncovered Bookmarks #24: Hackathon
Airtree's second hackathon - what a difference a year makes
A year ago we hosted our first hackathon at Airtree to encourage everyone in the team to test out tools like Lovable, n8n and Zapier to improve efficiency and capability in their area of the business.
Looking back, AI was primitive. At that time, non-technical builders still needed tools like n8n to create workflows. It took hours to figure out the right series of steps, the APIs you needed to access, and the output was still 7/10.
Today, plan mode in Claude Code can create detailed, considered specs that abstract all the complexity. Then Claude goes to work and builds something magical.
Where a year ago, people struggled to come up with ideas for what to automate, this year we had dozens of recommendations because we’ve spent a whole year talking about AI internally - we have an #ai-tooling Slack channel where everyone shares their skill files, good examples of future automation we can build, or news announcements from the labs.
At the end of the day we had 18 demos. Some of the lessons:
Use plan mode with Claude to iterate on the plan ahead of starting any build.
Don’t try to one-shot a huge project. Break it down into steps and create skills/subagents for each step.
It’s really hard to scrape LinkedIn (!)
Can’t wait to see what’s possible in 2027…
Links
Using multi-agent swarms to make better predictions:
Crazy Rich Bayesians:
Travis is back. Nailed the launch copy:
I have a real startup crush on Sunday Robotics:
I need ideas for a side hustle to try this out:
This is gorgeous prose:
Tracks
This makes me miss London…
Start 10 mins in….