1st place at the cursor hackathon
competed in my first hackathon this weekend, hosted by Cursor. went in not really knowing how i'd do compared to a room full of mostly experienced devs — students, CS majors, full-stack engineers as their day jobs. they gave us $20 in cursor credits and the rules were dead simple: use cursor to build something dope in 3 hours. shipped a thing called MassFlow — live at massflow.dev. took 1st. still kinda buzzing tbh.
what i built
MassFlow is a CMMS — computerized maintenance management system — for a fleet of LCMS instruments. mass spec gear. the way most labs track maintenance on this kind of equipment is.. some giant cursed Excel macro workbook that one person knows how to operate and nobody else dares touch lmao. classic.
so MassFlow yeets that and replaces it with a realtime web app and two AI features:
- AI maintenance logging — paste plain english like "system 24 had high pressure, replaced B-side accumulator seals around 10am, JHH helped" and the AI parses it into the structured form for you. you eyeball it, hit save, dashboard updates live.
- AI reports — free-form analyst. ask "give me the last 2 months of maintenance and any trends per assay" or anything else, and it goes and finds and summarizes the actual data. grounded, not vibes.
plus the boring-but-necessary stuff: dashboard with uptime %, what's down right now, PMs due, downtime trend. fleet list. instrument detail pages. landing page. a colophon for the stack. all live at a real domain.
the build
spent maybe 15 minutes on the idea then got to building. started with Composer 2 (cursor's kimi distilled agent) but quickly switched back to Opus 4.7 — opus is just on a different level for this kind of work. then ran parallel agents on different chunks of the backend while i did the frontend design myself.
for design i went straight to chatgpt's new image model, generated mocks, then had it write a prompt back with all the design details spelled out. dropped that prompt into a claude code agent inside cursor and told it to incorporate the design into the site. landing page + colophon came together fastttt.
halfway in pretty much everything was wired together but the functionality still needed real work. fine-tuned the UI, then went after the 2 AI features. hooked up claude haiku via openrouter for the maintenance parser. then built the report agent. while everything was cooking i came up with the name MassFlow and bought massflow.dev for like $8 lol.
honestly the only tough part the whole 3 hours was getting auth working for the demo. opus got it done.
they gave us 3 minutes to present and it FLEWWW by. didn't even get to showcase everything.
why i think i won
quality, UI, and completeness. my project actually worked end to end. it was live at a real domain anyone could visit with working credentials. the UI was cleannn. some projects were just running on localhost. others straight up didn't work during the demo. others had only enough time for the backend and the frontend wasn't ready.
i've been building with AI coming up on a year now and this was a good litmus test for where my skills are at. i love this stuff and i'm always listening for the latest trends, tools, news.. probably more than the average user. honestly surprised me how little some folks knew about the available tools — there were people there who had never even used cursor before. like.. the hackathon is hosted by cursor, fam.
takeaway
cool winning, especially my first one. already looking forward to leveling up in the next one. i'll keep saying it: agentic coding is the forefront of tech that is going to change the world. this hackathon was a room full of devs proving it in real time in 3 hours. i was just the one with the cleanest demo.
— chemistoncampus