I built a 60-second reflection app that paints you a watercolor keepsake. Days 2 + 3 of the $50K MeDo hackathon.

Vineet Negi — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 04:40:09 +0000

TL;DR

I spent the weekend building Evengood — a 60-second end-of-day reflection app — on MeDo, a no-code AI platform. You talk or type how your day was, it plays back a calming Tomorrow prompt in a soft voice, and it paints you a watercolor keepsake from the feeling behind your words.

Live: https://app-b3tuv7opfegx.appmedo.com/

The idea

Every journaling app I've tried feels like homework. Notebooks full of dashboards, streaks I fail at, prompts I resent. I wanted the opposite: a tiny ritual that takes under a minute, leaves you with something beautiful, and then gets out of the way. No login. Nothing saved on a server. Come back tomorrow if you want to.

The aesthetic target: a soft lavender-to-peach gradient, Playfair Display for the headings, deep-indigo text, a single breathing microphone circle. Feel, not features.

The MeDo stack

For non-builders reading this: MeDo is a chat-driven platform where you describe the app you want and it generates the full React + Vite + Tailwind codebase, wires in plugins, and hosts it. You iterate by sending follow-up prompts. It's not a template tool — it writes real code you can inspect and edit.

Evengood uses four MeDo plugins:

Speech-to-Text — captures the 60-second reflection when the user chooses to talk
Large Language Model (x2) — one call generates the Tomorrow prompt, a second call extracts a one-word "theme" like peaceful, proud, tender
Text-to-Speech — reads the Tomorrow prompt back in a calm voice
Kling (image generation) — paints the watercolor keepsake card using the theme word

The keepsake card — the part I'm proudest of

The theme word drives a Kling image prompt like:

soft dreamy watercolor, lavender to peach gradient, abstract calm feeling of peaceful, no text, no people, serene, ethereal, minimal

For my test reflection about finishing hard work and noticing the light through a kitchen window, the LLM picked peaceful and Kling painted me a field of lavender dissolving into a peach watercolor sky. The Tomorrow line ("Notice the way the air feels when you first open a window.") overlays in white serif. It's the kind of image you'd actually screenshot and keep.

Bugs, and how I debugged them without writing code

On v8, the Kling image silently fell back to a CSS gradient every time. Turned out the timeout was 15 seconds; Kling typically needs 20–40. I sent MeDo a fix prompt: bump the timeout to 45 seconds and add console.log statements before the call, on success, and on error. Next build, the logs made the whole flow observable:

[keepsake] calling Kling with prompt: soft dreamy watercolor, lavender to peach gradient, abstract calm feeling of peaceful...
[keepsake] Kling returned image url: https://...keepsake-ea752a84-....jpg

22 seconds end-to-end, and the watercolor rendered. That's the pattern I keep returning to on MeDo: ask for observability first, then debug.

Three things I learned

Feel is a spec. The best prompt I wrote wasn't a feature list — it was a paragraph describing how the app should feel when you use it. MeDo builds noticeably better when you give it emotional direction alongside technical constraints.
Persist client-side, aggressively. No-account apps live or die by localStorage. The 7-day streak and ambient soundscape choice both persist without a backend, and that keeps the app feeling lightweight.
One bundled prompt beats five small ones. I grouped my v8 changes (keepsake card + streak + soundscape) into a single well-scoped prompt with an explicit "DO NOT" list, and the output was dramatically cleaner than when I'd tried incremental changes.

Day 3 update — three things actually shipped

Between Day 2 and Day 3 I did one tight fix pass on MeDo (30 credits, one prompt, 38 tasks) and all three v8 rough edges are now solid:

1. Kling watercolor keepsake works end-to-end. Timeout bumped from 15s to 45s, console logs wrapped around the call. The image is now generated from the single theme word inferred from your reflection (calm, peaceful, hopeful, grateful…) and renders in ~22 seconds. No more gradient fallback.

2. Ambient soundscape toggle is wired. A small pill above the microphone lets you switch between Silent, Rain, and Soft piano. Choice persists in localStorage so it carries over between sessions. Audio fades in when the reflection starts and fades out on Tomorrow.

3. Streak tracker is real. Seven dots along the bottom of the keepsake card, today filled in deep indigo, past days filled in lavender, future days faded. Powered by a tiny localStorage array of ISO dates — no account, no server, still works.

The meta-lesson: on a no-code platform, observability is the superpower. One prompt asking for console.log before, on-success, and on-error made the Kling bug diagnosable in a single build cycle. I keep returning to that pattern.

Try it

https://app-b3tuv7opfegx.appmedo.com/

It takes 60 seconds. If it leaves you with a watercolor you actually want to keep, I'd love to hear about it.

Built for the Build with MeDo Hackathon — $50K in prizes, submissions open until May 20, 2026.

I joined a $50K no-code hackathon with zero coding experience. Day 1.

Vineet Negi — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 01:01:39 +0000

So here's what I did today.

I signed up for the Build with MeDo Hackathon on Devpost. $50,000 in prizes. 30 days. 2,343 people already registered before me. And my coding experience is basically: I once changed the background color on a Wordpress site and felt like a hacker for a week.

The twist: MeDo is a no-code platform. You describe what you want in plain English, an AI builds the app. So technically you don't need to know how to code. In theory.

I figured the smartest play wasn't to compete for the grand prize — 2,000+ developers with years of experience are going after that. There's also a Creative Content Award (10 winners × $500) for blog posts and videos about your project. And a Community Choice Award (5 × $500) voted on by the MeDo Discord. Those are way more winnable if you show up consistently and actually document the journey.

So I'm documenting the journey. That's what this post is.

What I'm building

It's called Evengood. The pitch is one sentence: end every day on an even, good note.

You open it at night, spend 60 seconds typing how your day went — the rough parts, the wins, whatever. Evengood gives you back a short, calm 2-minute audio reflection that actually mentions what you said, names one real win, and gives you one clear thing to carry into tomorrow. It saves a one-line journal entry automatically. Over a month you end up with a readable year-in-sentences thing.

I picked this because (a) I'd actually use it, (b) it's small enough to be buildable in 30 days of evening work, and (c) the story is easier to tell than "I built another todo app."

The plan

Week 1: post publicly every day (you're reading day 1), set up the scaffolding in MeDo, don't over-scope.
Week 2: build the three core features. One per day. No heroics.
Week 3: polish, deploy, record a demo video.
Week 4: write the retrospective, rally the community, submit on Devpost.

Why I'm writing this on day zero of code

Because by the end of 30 days this is either a story about a no-code beginner who shipped a real app and won some money, or it's a story about a no-code beginner who tried and flamed out on day 11. Both are useful. Both are worth writing down.

If you want to watch what happens, I'll be posting on X too (I won't link it here to keep this post tag-compliant — you can find me from my profile). Or just follow along on DEV.

Back tomorrow with day 2.

Forem: Vineet Negi