The clock starts. Twelve teams open their laptops. And almost every single one of them spends the first hour doing the same thing: debating which framework to use.
Not building. Debating.
By the time the tech stack is settled, a third of the first work session is gone. The domain is chosen, someone's cloning a boilerplate, and nobody's written a line of product code. This is the pattern at every hackathon I've been to — including the one where my team built EquityBridge, a platform to help social entrepreneurs find mission-aligned funding.
We wasted the first hour too.
Why It Happens
The problem isn't that teams are disorganized. It's that hackathons give you a hard deadline, a vague prompt, and no shared infrastructure for making decisions quickly. Every team reinvents the same wheel:
- Which auth library? (Clerk? NextAuth? Supabase? Roll it ourselves?)
- What's our project structure?
- Who's doing what?
- Which SDGs does our project touch?
The Pattern We've Identified
After looking at dozens of hackathon post-mortems, the teams that build the most in 24 hours share three traits:
1. They decide the stack in the first 10 minutes. Not because they debated it — because someone came in with a default. "We use Next.js, Supabase, and Tailwind unless there's a reason not to." Done.
2. They assign roles before they start coding. Not job titles. Actual responsibilities: who owns the landing page, who owns the data model, who talks to judges. Teams where this is unclear spend 40% of their energy on coordination instead of creation.
3. They pick components before writing them. The best teams have someone whose job in hour one is to find existing, working solutions for every non-core problem. Auth? Use a library. Payment? Stripe. Charts? Recharts. The core product is the only thing that needs to be original.
What Codefest.ai Is Built Around
Codefest.ai's component library exists to eliminate the component-picking bottleneck. Every entry has a setup time estimate, a difficulty rating, and compatibility notes — so you can make the shadcn/ui vs MUI decision in 30 seconds instead of 30 minutes.
The workspace is built around the same idea: come in with your domain selected, your SDGs picked, your team roles declared. The first hour becomes execution, not orientation.
That's the shift. Not a productivity hack. Not a better timer. Just removing the friction between "clock starts" and "first commit."
The first hour is the most expensive hour of the hackathon. Spend it building.