Hacky

seamless integration to knighhacks
seamless integration to knighhacks

Inspiration

At every hackathon, the teammate or mentor you need is already in the building, but finding them means scrolling Discord and hoping. We wanted one friendly character you can just ask.

## What it does

Hacky is an AI companion for hackathons. Tell it what you need and it finds the right teammate, team, or mentor, explains why each match fits, drafts the intro for you to send, and answers questions about the event.

## How we built it

React and Vite on Vercel, a Hono API, Neon Postgres with pgvector, Better Auth, and Gemini through the AI SDK. Matching fuses keyword and vector search, then scores each person on relevance, skill coverage, and goal fit.

## Challenges we ran into

Keeping matches honest: vector search always returns someone, so we added a score threshold and a real "no match" answer. We also fought a brand new AI SDK, live updates on serverless, and a transparent animated mascot on iPhones.

## What we learned

Hybrid search beats pure vector search for finding people, and an agent that drafts while the human decides is easier to trust than one that acts. I dropped the formulas, the accomplishments and what's-next sections, and the test counts.