Every event is full of opportunities. Event Copilot helps you find them.

About the Project

Inspiration

🇻🇳 Vietnam is famous for the Nón Lá 👒

It quietly guides, protects, and accompanies people on their journey.

We wanted to bring that same feeling to hackathons.

Builders constantly switch between Discord, Devpost, schedules, maps, workshops, and team discussions. Important opportunities are everywhere, yet easy to miss.

So we built Cue.

👒 A digital Nón Lá for hackathons.

An AI companion that helps participants stay informed, find teammates, discover opportunities, and focus on building instead of searching for information.

Because the best hackathon experience should feel exciting, not overwhelming.

What It Does

Cue is not just a chatbot; it is a full-featured event cockpit that lives on your phone as a Progressive Web App (PWA):

The "FOMO Killer" Schedule and Checklist: Switch seamlessly between the Full Agenda (workshops, key dates, partner events) and My Checklist (your bookmarked events, custom personal tasks, and developer notes).
Smart Onboarding and Devpost Linkage: Sign in with Google, paste your Devpost profile link, and Cue instantly pulls your developer bio, skills, and interests to build your matching card.
AI Teammate Finder: Looking for a co-founder or a backend engineer? Cue scans crawled participant profiles to suggest matching teammates based on complementary roles and shared stack interests.
Intent-Driven AI Chat: Chat naturally with Cue to query schedule events, find venues, or list sponsor perks. To protect user data from LLM hallucination, the agent uses Confirmable Intents: when the AI proposes adding a task or booking a mentor, it generates a UI card, and the action is only executed when you tap Confirm.
AI Pitch Coach (High-Reasoning Mode): Submit your presentation draft, and Cue's coach (powered by Gemini's high-thinking reasoning) grades your pitch, points out 3 concrete improvements, and simulates 3 tough questions that judges are likely to ask on Demo Day.
Office Hours Mentor Booking: Find mentors by their area of expertise and book their available slots with a single tap.
Public Build Log: A community micro-blogging feed where teams post quick progress updates, screenshots, and milestones to share their building journey.
Offline Access and Web Push Reminders: Never miss a session. Cue works offline and triggers browser push notifications 15 minutes before bookmarked workshops start.

How We Built It

We built Cue using a modern, serverless-native monorepo architecture optimized for speed, reliability, and offline capability:

The Core Stack: The frontend is built on Next.js (App Router) styled with a premium glassmorphic dark theme using Tailwind CSS and shadcn/ui.
Offline and Mobile Optimization: We used Serwist to implement a Service Worker that caches the event agenda and synchronization state in IndexedDB, ensuring the app remains fully functional in crowded venues with weak signals.
Serverless Backend: For structured transactional data (checklists, bookings, teams), we utilized Cloudflare D1 (Serverless SQL) with Drizzle ORM packaged in a fast, decoupled Cloudflare Worker API.
Vector Knowledge Base: Documentations, FAQs, and partner perks were crawled using the Firecrawl API, converted into high-dimensional vectors, and indexed in Chroma DB.
AI Coordination: Powered by Vercel AI SDK v5 and @ai-sdk/google (accessing Gemini 3.5), allowing fast streaming replies, tool calling, and structured output generation.

Smart Algorithms Made Simple

Under the hood, Cue is powered by intelligent, fast algorithms designed to deliver high-quality answers and recommendations:

Semantic Search (RAG): When you search for "database help," Cue doesn't just look for that exact keyword. It understands the concept and successfully retrieves the "Postgres Scaling Workshop" or "Cloudflare D1 Setup Guide."
Proactive Nudge Engine: To recommend workshops instantly without slowing down the page, Cue ranks upcoming events by cross-referencing your onboarding interests with session topics and blending it with a countdown timer. You get recommendations tailored to you, starting right when you need them.
Objective Pitch Evaluation: The Pitch Coach breaks down your presentation script across critical hackathon criteria (Problem Clarity, Demo Strength, and AI Value). It runs a weighted scoring model to ensure your overall mark is a fair reflection of your script's strengths.

Challenges We Faced

AWS WAF Blockade: Devpost protects its participants list with AWS WAF, blocking standard API requests. We solved this by writing a headless Playwright crawler that logs in securely, handles infinite scroll, and extracts the participant cards successfully.
LLM Write Integrity: Letting an LLM write directly to a transactional database is risky. Our solution of Confirmable Intents ensures that the AI only builds the payload, while the user keeps absolute control over database writes.
Serverless DB Cross-Connectivity: Connecting Vercel's Node environment to Cloudflare D1 efficiently was a challenge due to network boundaries. We bypassed this by building a dedicated Cloudflare Worker data-api, wrapping SQL queries in secure HTTPS API endpoints.

What We Learned

PWAs are essential for events: Crowded venues block signals. Caching the schedule offline is a lifecycle requirement for event apps, not a nice-to-have.
Thinking models shine on critique: Standard LLMs give superficial feedback. Activating Gemini's high-thinking reasoning for the Pitch Coach yielded incredibly realistic, sharp, and helpful judging suggestions.
Strict confirmation UX: Separating AI reasoning (intent) from action (database write) prevents user frustration and database corruption.

What's Next

We want to expand Cue from a hackathon prototype into a global event platform:

AI Calendar Synchronization: Directly export bookmarked workshops and custom tasks to Google and Apple Calendars with real-time updates.
Proactive Matching Notifications: A background matching engine that calculates compatibility scores between solo developers' profiles and team needs, instantly sending a push notification when a perfect match is found.
Reveal.js Markdown Slideshow Generator: Allow the Pitch Coach to generate a downloadable markdown slide presentation outline based on the user's pitch feedback, saving hours of design work before Demo Day.
Live Mentorship Queue: A real-time triage dashboard showing active mentor availability and waiting times.