AI Hacks Berkeley 2025: Aniyah's Reflection

Hi !!

This is a review of my experience at the AI hackathon by CalHacks at Berkeley.

I heard about this opportunity through SFU Surge and applied for fun. With limited hackathon experience and none outside of Metro Vancouver, I didn’t think much of it and forgot about it until I received an acceptance email! :D

Travel expenses weren’t covered for this hackathon so I had to take care of that myself.

Day 1 - June 20th, 2025

My flight to San Francisco was around 3:00 PM and I enjoyed a nice tunacado sandwich from Joe & the Juice at the airport. I got to SF around 6 PM and drove around, tried canes - wasn’t impressed (I even got the cup full of sauce), and watched the sunset at the pier. It was super windy, as pictured.

Later, I checked into my hotel in Berkeley and that was it for the first day!

Day 2 - June 21st, 2025

Today I went to the AI Hackathon by CalHacks!

@8:00 AM

I woke up to great views and got ready to make my way over to Berkeley to check in for the hackathon. I didn’t know anyone that was going so I grouped up with 3 people from the team-formation slack channel.

@10:30 AM

I met up with my team and watched the opening ceremony. This was the biggest hackathon I had been to so far so it was really cool to see such a large group of people ready to build for 24 hours.

@11:00 AM

My team and I joined a workshop by Anthropic on using Claude. We got some tips on prompt engineering, usage, and how to enable ‘YOLO’ mode:

claude –dangerously-skip-permissions

After the workshop we got ready to get started on the project! We went to the main building and got seated at a table after getting lunch. With it being such a beautiful day, the campus looked extra stunning. Our idea was to build a neurodivergent friendly productivity app!

The main features of our app includes:

• recognize behaviour through facial expression and adjust the schedule and priorities in the app based on that data.
• process fragmented thoughts into structured tasks (with accuracy)
• use voice, text, and camera inputs to comprehensively capture tasks
• an emotional support feature that provides adhd aware responses

Since this was an AI hackathon, we were encouraged to use ‘vibe’ coding tools to help build our projects so we used Cursor as our AI assistant and our tech stack consisted of React + Typescript for the frontend, Supabase and Docker for the backend, then we used Claude, Groq, and Vapi for the inputs.

@3:30 PM there were llamas to pet as a way to calm down and relax. They were really friendly and so cute!!

Around 6:30 PM dinner was served and I got chicken biryani which was pretty good but they could have been a little more generous with the vegetables imo T_T

@9:09 PM

I went outside to work on the project for some fresh air and to enjoy the views of the campus. The weather was so good, it wasn’t cold at all.

@10:21 PM

it was time to go back inside, fuel up on funyuns and energy drinks, and continue the grind. At this point things were going fair but it was a challenge to get our facial recognition feature to behave as expected. I also struggled with getting the backend to connect as the tools I was using were unfamiliar to me. But, we pushed through and got mostly everything working and continued the rest on our own, as well as the following morning.

@12:00 AM I went back to the hotel to catch some sleep and freshen up before the next day!

Day 3 - June 22nd, 2025

@7:30 AM I made my way back to the university and continued working hard with my team to get our project out in the last few hours.

@4:00 PM

The closing ceremony started and it's always so cool to see what people built over the weekend. A lot of people skip the closing ceremony, especially when they feel like it is guaranteed they didn't win a prize. However, I really enjoy them and if I skipped the closing ceremonies where I felt that way at hackathons, then I wouldn't have been there to see any of the prizes I DID win! Even when you don’t see your project’s name on the screen, it is valuable to look at what other people built and get inspired by their creations or to see ‘what’ makes a winning project.

@7:12 PM

I’m back at the hotel and I wanted to enjoy my last evening here so I decided to go to the pool and read a book I received at the hackathon called ‘Principles of Building AI Agents’ by Sam Bhagwat. I caught an early sleep and went back to Vancouver the next morning!