Anchor: My Weekend as a "Vibe Coder" in the Hackathon Trenches
I’ve spent 18 years in GTM and growth, effectively sitting on the business side of the glass.
Walking into that room, the energy was different. You see these bright, young minds ideating at light speed, spinning up instances, and shipping code before I’ve finished my coffee. It’s intimidating, but mostly, it’s electric. There is a raw optimism in watching people build the future in real-time.
As a non-developer, I didn’t bring a keyboard full of shortcuts. I brought a problem that kept me up at night.
The Spark: Fear, Hype, and the Human Moat
The birth of Anchor came from a place of genuine anxiety. We hear the titans of industry, Musk and Altman, speaking of the "greener pastures" AI will create. But simultaneously, we see the harsh reality of redundancy, with headlines from the World Economic Forum and the Anthropic CEO signaling that roles are disappearing.
I looked around at my own circle: my wife, my friends, seasoned professionals, and fresh graduates. Are they prepared? When the anxiety hits, whether it’s a baby boomer struggling with clerical changes or a sales pro watching their inbox get automated, where do they go?
I realized we didn’t need another tool that just "does the work." We needed a bridge.
Anchor is a private, 1:1 psychological career counselor. It’s an empathy engine first, a tutor second. It listens to the fear, validates the "Human Moat" (the value only you bring), and only then asks for consent to start the upskilling journey. It moves you from "AI is taking my job" to "Here is how I use AI agents," step by step.
The Stack: Building Without Coding
This is where the magic of 2026 comes in. I didn't write lines of code in a dark room; I orchestrated them.
- The Blueprint: I defined the use case and product flow.
- The Architect: I used Gemini Pro to outline the detailed tech stack.
- The Engine: I used Smallest.ai as the powerful base for the state-tech reasoning.
- The Builder: I used Antigravity.
I cannot overstate this: Antigravity was the difference between having an idea and having a product. It simplified the flow and assisted the build in a way that let me focus on the logic, not the syntax.
The Drama (It’s Not a Hackathon Without It)
I thought I was cruising until the final hour.
30 minutes before submission: I hit a critical roadblock. The interface was "remembering" my testing conversations. It wouldn't reset. Anchor was supposed to treat every user as a fresh interaction, but it was holding onto old baggage. I was panic-fixing bugs with 15 minutes on the clock.
The Video Crunch: The demo had a strict 2-minute limit. I managed to rap the entire walkthrough in 1:58. In the rush to edit, I accidentally cut the segment covering the technical scope. It was imperfect, it was messy, but I hit "Submit" just before the deadline.
The Irony of Judgment
Here is the part that gave me chills. The hackathon wasn’t just judged by humans. The initial screening, whittling submissions down to the top 3, was done by "Clawbot Judges" (AI agents).
The AI functioned like a sophisticated ATS recruitment system. I realized (a bit too late!) that even if I had uploaded a 30-minute technical deep dive fast-forwarded to just 2 minutes, the system would have deciphered the depth effortlessly. It was deconstructing intent, not just watching pixels.
It felt like a perfect, ironic validation of Anchor’s mission. We are entering a world where AI judges our output. If we don’t have tools like Anchor to help us adapt, understand, and communicate our value to these systems, we get left behind.
The Takeaway
Participating in this gave me a profound respect for the "churn," that messy, exhausting, exhilarating process of turning a thought into a thing. It was fun to step into the shoes of a coder for a weekend, to feel the pressure, and to build something that might actually help people lose their fear.
You can check out the chaotic, exciting result below.