Glimpse

Inspiration After college, our friend groups scattered across cities. The group chat goes quiet, and "we should catch up" never turns into anything. The hackathon prompt was to build something AI can't do, and the answer felt obvious: AI can't make memories with your friends. So we built an app where AI only handles the logistics and every photo comes from a real friend.

What it does Glimpse gives each friend group one AI-generated photo prompt per cycle (the group picks the length, 1–7 days). Prompts range from everyday ("your view right now") to niche but doable ("the most chaotic thing in your fridge"). Everyone uploads as many photos as they like, and they stay sealed until the cycle ends. In the meantime, you only see whose avatars have lit up.

When the timer runs out, Glimpse reveals one shareable moodboard, like Spotify Wrapped for your friend group:

• A scrappy, Pinterest-style collage of everyone's real photos, in polaroid frames with tape, doodles and drop shadows
• An AI-written "vibe" label for the cycle (like "postcards from:"), plus a color palette pulled from the photos
• Two styles: scrapbook (cozy, cream paper, puffy stickers) and film (edge-to-edge, white paint swipes, yellow marker)
• Portrait (for stories) and landscape versions After the reveal, friends decorate the board together with hand-drawn stickers our team made, then share it. Every board is saved in a scrapbook of the friendship over time.

How we built it

• Next.js (App Router) + TypeScript + Tailwind: a mobile-first web app, installable to the home screen
• Claude (Anthropic API): writes each cycle's prompt and, with vision, reads the cycle's photos to produce the vibe label, palette and board style sharp + Satori: render the board on the server, layering shadows, frames, tape, stickers and paint strokes
• A no-keys demo mode: a local stand-in for Supabase and a pick-a-friend sign-in, so we could demo the whole flow reliably on stage

Challenges we ran into

• Making the boards look hand-made rather than generated: scattered layouts, torn edges, paint-brush strokes and soft shadows, all composited on the server
• Keeping "hidden until the reveal" airtight: photos stay private, and the reveal can't fire twice if two people trigger it at once
• Fitting anywhere from 3 to 80 photos onto one page while still showing at least one photo from every friend
• Next.js 16 changes and dev-environment quirks (a colon in our folder name broke npm), all while moving fast

Accomplishments that we're proud of

• The AI never generates a single pixel of the photos. Every image on the board is real, which keeps us true to the prompt.
• Boards that look like something you'd actually post, in two distinct styles and two orientations
• Hand-drawn stickers from our own team, so decorating feels personal
• A complete loop, from prompt to sealed uploads to reveal to decorate to share to scrapbook, that runs end to end in the demo

What we learned

• The best use of AI here was small and invisible: one sentence and five colors. The friends are the actual product.
• Constraints like one prompt, photos sealed until the end and a single page create anticipation better than a constant feed does.
• Design details (shadows, tilt, tape) did more for the "this is ours" feeling than any extra feature would have.

What's next for Glimpse

• Push notifications when a prompt drops or a board is ready
• A yearly "Friendship Wrapped" built from every board
• Streaks and gentle nudges for quiet friends
• More board styles and community-made sticker packs
• A printable scrapbook export

Built With

• claude
• gemini
• procreate