The Hackathon Skill
A repeatable way to start, prototype, and finish a micro project in a single sitting.
Context
Side projects usually die between "good idea" and "shipped artifact." I wanted a system that turned the urge to build into a finished thing on the same afternoon — a project page, a Git history, and screenshots showing the work mid-flight.
Challenge
Documentation slows builders down. The capture system had to run during the build without adding friction, and behave the same way across chat, Cowork, and Claude Code without three forks of the workflow.
Execution
Three-phase skill: Kickoff (capture the brief, scaffold the folder, git init), Build (passive logging of prompts, tools, and decisions), Ship (compute elapsed time, generate the project page).
Six templates so every run produces the same structure: LOG.md, INVENTORY.md, transcript.md, README, project page draft, and a card-meta JSON.
Environment detection: screenshots fire automatically in Cowork, user attaches an image in Claude Code, skill prints milestone callouts in chat.
Hackathon #001 is the skill itself. The first run produced this page.
Work
Step one was reverse-engineering the schema. The skill had to slot into the existing portfolio without changing anything around it.
Sketched four phases — Kickoff, Build, Ship, Publish. Each one a single prompt apart. Each one captured automatically.
Dogfooded by documenting this very build as Hackathon #001. Every prompt, pivot, and decision stamped to the second — the log wrote itself.
One push to main. Vercel deployed in under a minute. Thirty-eight minutes from first prompt to live URL.
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