Inspiration Every productivity app assumes students have willpower. We know better. We built a tool that stops fighting human laziness and weaponizes it by holding your operating system hostage until you've wasted enough time to deserve to work. Just like the game Max Payne 3 which this project is inspired by, you have to answer a ridiculous riddle to be able to quit the game.
What it does It poses as a sleek focus timer but instantly traps you. The app: Blocks the close button and disables Alt + F4. Forces you to watch your tuition money burn in real-time. Requires you to solve gaslighting riddles just to escape back to your desktop.
How we built it Tech: C# and WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation). Process: We intercepted the Windows Closing lifecycle event to block all exit signals, wrapped it in a clean dark-mode UI, and relied heavily on AI to write the actual code.
Challenges we ran into AI Arguments: Spending hours trying to convince the AI that we wanted the app to act like malware and ignore user commands. The Video Failure: We tried to embed videos, but WPF fought back, so we deleted the feature entirely out of spite.
Accomplishments that we're proud of The live Tuition Wasted Ticker. Watching a multi-threaded timer accurately calculate and display your financial ruin by $0.05 every second provides unparalleled psychological dread.
What we learned It is alarmingly easy to code digital Stockholm syndrome, and prompt engineering a chaotic AI assistant is a full-time job.
What's next for The Best Productivity App Startup Integration: Forcing it to launch on Windows boot so you have to procrastinate immediately. Anti-IDE Shield: Automatically closing VS Code or Word the second you try to do actual work.
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