Making It Up As I Go.

This is a submission for the World's Largest Hackathon Writing Challenge: Building with Bolt.

My plan is to update this essay for the duration of this challenge. Essentially to write how I felt, what i remember doing during the WLH, rather than submitting a full essay in one go.

The Start:

Wrote on 11.07.25

A HACHATHON that gives you the tools to embrace your creativity really is a big time opportunity to show the world what you can do. So when the builder's pack was being distributed, I was very excited to as I waited to receive my own pack. I felt like I could make any application I wanted, with a Pro subscription with Bolt.new, Elevenlabs, dev.to, an many others, the world was TRUELY my oyster. The desire to make anything that I could think of was possible.

Then when I finally received my own Builder's Pack. It was go time. I already read through the rules and understood the challenge. Now, I had the toolbox. I got my Pro sub for Bolt.new, then I went on to make my first project. I knew what application I wanted to build, so went I prompted bolt what to build, was very happy to see it build what is requested on the first try. My only problem was that, I didn't know how I wanted it to look - and I'm a designer - so I planned to rather get the application functional first, then build its form afterwards.

The first of four Abandoned Projects: Home Soidier

Wrote on 12.07.25

I was building a sort-of, progression game for kids, with the parents being the role of order. The application would help make chores truly rewarding. I you have ever watched the first season of Everybody Hates Chris, then you would remember an episode, where Chris briefly talks about an odd game his family would play, about cleaning the damn house. In that scene, Chris mentions that he won the garbage removal competition 3-4 years in a row.

Imagine that, for 3-4 years you are the only sibling taking out the garbage because your siblings don't wanna get their hands dirty. An the only reward is a thank you. Sorry, but, NO THANK YOU. At that point, the system feels rigged. Appreciation gets old, a child wants to be rewarded for their efforts. So, my vision for the application was to make the child work through their work, and keep their reward and recognition in their sights. This would make them more diligent in doing their chores without being told, and motivate then to take on more responsibility as they level up, but to use their position properly - like the child with the highest level being next in charge when mom and dad are out, but being demoted if they abuse their role - this making for more motivated children.

So, a website was made for parents to be introduced, and the main activity page that would be used by the child of the parent. I got the authentication setup with Supabase, all the buttons functioning. Now I need to take it a step further, with some cool and innovative, AI. I wanted to have a chatbot that the child would talk to, not chat to, I had an Elevenlabs Creator account, I wanted to make full use of my tools. Apparently, this was not gonna be as easy as I thought. When I prompted Bolt, to allow me to have a LLM that I can speak to and have it talk back to me, I bit off more than I could chew. And this is where all hell bro loose.

Bolt told me that I needed Api's for transcribing, for the model to interpret the message, for elevenlabs to use the realistic voices, and that I need to store then as secrets/or function in the backend. So I took a quick detour to fetch the api keys for each service, I prepared to put them in the .env file, then I found out that is a big no no , and I actually need to store them on the backend as it suggested before. Now I have never used any database before, so instead of blindly clicking on buttons, I use the AI chat on Supabase to do me a solid. I gave me step-by-step guidance, but it wasn't totally easy to follow as it referred me to places that their titles changes, so it left me guess working if I was in the right place. But, eventually I got it done. I could use the microphone, send a message and got back an error message.

Everything worked like I wanted but I just could not talk with the AI chatbot, and to add insult to injury, my preview screen started to seize up showing me a forever loading page, flickering white occasionally. Now, I cannot even see any future changes I make.

Wrote on 16.07.25

At this point I was using a Celeron laptop, 2017 model w/ 4GB ram. So I thought that this might be a hardware problem, and to test it out I visited my bro to use his pc. An HP EliteDesk 800 G3. i7 6700, 8GB RAM, AND....an NVME SSD. I was open to a new world. Blazing fast boot and loading speed. I could continue to work on my projects.

Curiosity killed the cat.

Now I was getting deeper to using bolt, so checked out the documentation for best practices. The two I tried out was clearing unused files and resetting the context window. I did this to experience how it was like, after that i deleted the duplicate projects and continued. However, I noticed that my token were taking a hit, like 200k per change. So I decided to try saving my token as I tried before. But this time, I took a different approach. I went to settings, clicked on general, then I saw the button to delete chat all chats. Then I clicked in, and all of my projects was gone.

Honestly when I clicked this damn button I thought it would do the same thing as resetting the context window. So, when I saw my project was gone, that it no longer existed, I panicked hard. I was distraught, "all my work was gone, all that hard work for nothing" - I know lame, I considered the result of all my prompting in natural language as "hard work" - but I realized that I already integrated Github to this project, so I just had to make a new connection to restore what I lost. There was still hope. But considering that I was proficient with Github as old people are with using their phones, that hope was looking grime.

Now this is exactly what I did.

1. I went on a new page on bolt.
2. I selected the import form Github button, I selected the repo that I was working on.
3. waited

Horray, connection has been restored. I was so relieved. So, I went on to ask bolt to make a change to my project, and as I waited a response came back, saying something like request could not be fulfilled, or failed to load files. It was like getting stabbed in a wound that already healed. I clicked on a bunch of files and they has no code at all. Now, I was so discouraged by this fact, that I decided to move on to a now project, and try remaking this project later.

Quick side story. For the second project I wanted to make, I wanted to try it out in ONE SHOT. I would give bolt the would structure of the website, what the purpose of the website was about, how you would navigate, , the colors, the functions, all of it. And I used Gemini to setup the prompt. once I was ready I, I Ctrl+C, then Ctrl+V'd into bolt, hit go and I kid you not it literally made 99.99% of what I wanted. c And this is the project that I was so happy of that I made a submission to the hackathon, for the single prompt challenge. I called in helloworld. DO you think you can guess what the website is about.

The second of four Abandoned Projects: BoxerBill

** Wrote on 22.06.25**

Now I want tackling my second/third serious project. After the abomination that happened with my first project I learned quite a lot about how Bolt functions and its integrations. So, for this project. The idea was to detect when you commit to a subscription and it will simply make a reminder a few days before the due date to for you to cancel. Then when the due date arrives, you can cancel the subscription yourself or use a browsing agent like Runner H to cancel it for you. And that is what I told Bolt. It was able to make this into an extension that I could download a unpack in chrome.

Now as a rookie, I didn't know the first thing about making an extension. Just getting it to load in chrome was a pain, apparently a dist folder needs to be compiled before you can download the project. So when it did finally load, I just wanted the detection feature to work. AND IT DIDN'T!!!! At this point I was ready to crash out, I couldn't even get Ai to understand what Ai should do - I used Gemini to form the input I provided to bolt.

The way that the extension was suppose to work was to register a click on any button that leads to the users subscribing, so like, recognizing the words 'pay now' or 'get plus', and if the user clicks on that button to sets a calendar reminder.

So since this is how I made it operate I thought a simple simulation should help test the feature. So I headed over to Gemini to make such a sim., did the test, and you know the rest.

Free with a fee.

Well at this stage, I made 2 projects. Bolt had Entri who offered free domains, and I wanted to have a website, so I went exploring. There were a handful of names that I thought of, and they all sounded cool. But I committed to one that suited it very well. I proceeded to get my domain which was free for a whole year, when I clicked buy, I went on my banking app to confirm. But, I noticed something strange. I needed to pay a one time admin/or setup fee to get this free domain. So there was a catch. Great. I was not planning of paying for a 'free' domain, so I didn't. I cancelled and looked for another option. The builder's pack had a bunch of goodies that I still had not used of I went through them and I did catch something good.

There was a Dev Community subscription which itself was like a pack of other subscriptions, and there was a lot. So card by card I looked for the solution to my problem. I was able to find 2 services offering free domain, a .fun, and a .tech. I decided to go with the .tech domain because the things I was making in bolt were less 'fun' and more 'tech'. And it was actually free, no hidden costs. I was happy to have to have a clean domain to my liking, now I needed to set up the connection. The process was not all that difficult and I went on to use this domain for all the projects I made with bolt.

After that I moved on to make my next project.

The third of four Abandoned Projects: Following

This was a simple statistical project, and starting off small, I wanted to connect 5 of the most popular social media platforms to show the total number of followers the user had.

I envisioned a big and bold badge that showed the total followers from all platforms, when you get connected. Then some basic metrics and tools. Once again I used Gemini to form the necessary prompt and I pasted it into Bolt. Now the results was mostly what I wanted, but I was so wowed by what I made that I decided ditch what I planned and just work with what I got.

I was pleased to see how relevant the tools that bolt suggested were to the platform, and the demo version worked well. Smooth animations and everything updated accordingly. Now I again faced the challenge of integration data through api to show the follower count and some metrics from posts.

So in my frustration I took a break. For like a week. Then my the end of my break I received an article that talked about a study conducted to assess the impact of using AI. And the article really, really struck me. The group that used ChatGPT as much as they wanted, performed cognitively worse than the group that had zero access to AI. AND worse, that same group did EVEN worse when their access to AI was cut off.

Every Ai tools is programmed to give you the answer first try. So most of us are going to become in some way like that group, especially school students.

So that moment felt like I came up with a big brain idea. "Just make a model that behaves like a mentor". It will guide you to the answer, not just be an common answering machine.

So I got to it.

The last of four Abandoned Projects: Phil

Now around this time it was the weekend, and Bolt gave 20M tokens for a limited time. So I went crazy. Keep in mind the Pro plan gives 10M and I had 3M remaining. I knew these token would go to waste if I was to strict. So in this project is use the 21st.dev components, hard. getting the catchiest hero, coolest animations, cleanest UIs. I was having an absolute field day. Also sorting out bugs was not that hard. The setup for this project was more simple that my other projects. Just 2 pages in total, the main page is probably 90% made with the components from 21st.dev, and the UI for the second was like ChatGPT and Gemini. Very simple. I got it all right and I even was able to chat to the model like I envisioned. I does not give the answer, I guided me to it. And this was my next best project. I was committed to submit this one to the hackathon. I really wanted to use the voice feature with 11Labs's realistic voice but I was happy to make the changes later. All I had to do was make the video and do the submission. I could work on it later if there was time.

So I made the video, I posted it, and I started on the submission process. Now at this point if felt like life just wanted me to pull a fast one on me because during the process of me submitting my network went straight offline. Like a line was severed. I really could not do anything at that point, and there were literal hours till the deadline.

After a while of waiting and hoping, I just put it aside to do whenever the network goes live. But I only had a short window. 2PM comes by, still offline. 4PM comes by, still nothing. 6:30PM comes by, WERE BACK BABY, no it was just an involuntary spike by a network with no hope of coming back soon.

I have a data plan that cuts off at 7PM in the evening until 12 midnight. So I absolutely was in trouble. Because I take a while to fill the pages on the submission form. So there was no room for error it the worst situation played out. But it did! And it was worse!! I woke up late even, so the ABSOLUTE WORST situation was playing out!!! My heart was throbbing, I rushed to check the network status and I watched it for 2 minutes, the connection was stable but so weak. Sooo weak. I went on devpost, and saw there was actually an extension on the headline, so go to it. I regretted not at least preparing the form before have so that I could copy and paste now when I needed it.

Tick tock, tick tock, the remaining time is not a lot. The page too forever to continue, I wondered if it even mattered to continue. But, I continued with the hope that if the connection improved then my chances would be better. But alas, it just wasn't meant to be. Submissions closed and I was unsuccessful.

Reflecting

I had 5 projects made in Bolt, but only one made it to the finish. The second fell just short, and the rest needed more attention, skill.

I remember waiting as I anticipated the things I would make with such a game-changing technology. To make things I could only dream of, like my own Jarvis AI, like Tony. But then when the moment comes, I was stuck wonder what to even make. I started to wonder where are that desire and vision go. Steadily they rolled in, and the only hurdle was the knowledge to use these tools.

The builder pack had a bunch or free goodies and I just barely scratched the surface to really getting to use them. Regrettably, I never even used some of them. A cool debugging tool, Sentry, shows replays of errors that occur to make debugging easier. I didn't get to use it all that much during the hackathon, but it has like a 6 month paid for plan that I activated and I do hope to use it some more.

As of now, little progress has been made on my project as I mostly used by brother machine of a laptop which he now needs like all the time. So I gotta be quick with what I do. Although quick is not that much.

I surely got to get familiar using Github and Git for controlling the version I worked on. At one point I had like 200 unmerged commits, and it was a serious pain merging them and not breaking anything. There were pushes then reverts, then new branches needed to be made.

Another cool tool I missed out on was Pica. Not to be confused with Pika, the AI Video generation tool. I thought it was the same so I didn't check it out until it was tool late :( .

Well that is all for my journey to "vibe coding". If I think of something interesting that happened that I didn't already share I may update this. Or post a follow up/expanded topic.

If you read all this, thanks. Very Interesting to see such a dedicated reader!

all the projects i am working on are at

https://modelinfer.tech/