Pier 48 was crowded with young programmers swarming around lugging keyboards and other equipment to the first tables they could grab. A literal line of red tape cut the concrete space in half. One half was the “man” side, with people energetically sharing ideas over cups of cheap coffee.
The other half was the quieter “machine” side with teams sitting down in front of large monitors and machines. The whirring of fans was louder than their sparse chatter.
Melina was one of the “men”. She wore her old t-shirt from Blade Runner, the ironic motto “More Human Than Human” which felt like it felt today. In-between sips, she typed out crafted lines of code. Her teammate, Mike, wasn’t even typing. He was scribbling with his stylus onto his tablet to come up with a user interface. A sad ghost was surrounded by mock windows and buttons.
“We should call it ‘Memeory Lane’,” he offered.
“A pun?” Melina smirked. “That’s beneath even you, Mike.”
“The best ideas are always slightly stupid. That, and simple, and relatable. The Holy Trinity,” he joked back as he added a fedora to the ghost. “The app lets people leave meme-based ghosts in real-world spots using AR for their friends to find. It’s supposed to be fun.”
“Even the best name is pointless if this tracking library doesn’t compile. I can’t believe it hasn’t been touched in five years. This CMake file is a complete mess. No docs. Hundreds of GitHub issues asking for help and no answers. I can’t believe I’m doing this,” her left leg shook anxiously as she read a long list of error messages filling up her terminal.
“If you’re wondering why it’s a mess, you can probably point to... them,” Mike gestured his head at the other side of the red line.
Jack Urvan supervised his team of prompters while his hands rested against his charcoal gray vest from Patagonia. One of his teammates quickly spoke into a headset with a calm confidence.
“First, generate microservices for user authentication and data persistence tied to user ID. The entire app should be bootstrapped on top of AWS Lambda. Install a DynamoDB instance. Make sure to set up an encrypted cert. Then configure a Kubernetes cluster to run the app with three nodes. Draft the API docs using OpenAPI 3.0 spec.”
Melina flinched. One single prompt to their AI agent would take a whole team of devs weeks to build.
“Having fun over there with your typing?” Jack asked, his voice dripping with sarcasm.
“We love a good workout,” Mike retorted.
“We’re just beginning our project now. By the end of the hackathon we’ll have built an entire digital twin of the city for optimization. We’ll have the city’s entire transit, power, and water mapped out. I figure we’ll have the core simulation running by the end of the hour.”
Melina’s knee stopped shaking. An hour? Her and Mike had spent the last two hours just trying to link to a single C++ library, and it still wasn’t done. She watched her competitors as lines of code, thousands of them, scrolled down their monitors. The code wasn’t human-readable, not really. It was dense, using variables and functions that were written by a machine for a machine.
“Don’t let him intimidate you,” Mike murmured, keeping his voice low to prevent their competition from overhearing. “Their AI is impressive and flashy, but where’s the real market fit to the user?”
“At the end of this, the users are going to be the judges, and they’re looking for something impressive. A million dollars is a serious prize,” she grumbled. She looked back at the errors piling up on her own monitor. “He’s building an entire city. All we have is a cartoon ghost and even that can’t show up.”
She looked down at her smartwatch, seeing that they were already three hours in and they had just twenty-one hours to go.
Soon enough they hit midnight. The air of Pier 48 had only grown more intense as all the teams started to operate on fumes. Plates full of cold pizza crusts sat on all the tables. Crushed cans of energy drinks sat in makeshift pyramids. Beanbag chairs became crowded with coders eager for a quick nap before returning to the grind. Melina developed an itchy nose due to the growing stench of body odor filling the room.
On the center of her phone was a glitchy image of the “This is Fine” dog which was just a flat pane. If she didn’t keep the phone perfectly still, it would suddenly flicker out of existence. It was supposed to be anchored in the real world, so that she could move around it and it would appear like a real ghost living in an alternate dimension.
“The spatial anchor seems broken,” she complained. “The AR library seems to be running too slow. The tracking just doesn’t work. I wish I could just...”
“But you can’t. The rules for our side are that everything needs to be done manually,” Mike noted. He rubbed his face. His eyes were in a permanent squint as he stared at a screen long past his bedtime. “Forget the library. We have spent six hours on this and all the user can see is a broken dog.”
“It needs to be perfect! The core of our app is placing a ghost. If that doesn’t work, we don’t have an app,” she yelled, speaking louder and harsher than she intended. “Maybe I can find a way to fix the rendering pipeline and fix the refresh rate.”
“Stop!” he slammed his hand on the door, causing the virtual dog to disappear. “We’ve gotten so deep into the weeds of technical details we’ve forgotten the whole point of this. We’re supposed to be building something fun. So far we’ve just built a nightmare. Let’s just cut the whole thing out. Make it a simple photo app. We still have time to get something done.”
Melina felt a deep sense of apprehension. They had talked about the idea all week. It felt like they were giving up. Moreover, she felt a personal shame that she had let him down.
“I can fix it,” she insisted. “If I just had a bit more time.”
“But there isn’t any time,” Mike leapt out of his seat and clenched his fists. “A hackathon is about limited time, putting together a few clever tricks with duct tape. We’re not trying to build a product that we can launch tomorrow.”
He stepped away from the code and picked up his tablet again. He stared at the mocked UI, with the simple ghost in a hat and he took a deep breath.
“Maybe we’ve spent too much time trying to make the app a fully polished product. We could just cheat.”
“What does that even mean?”
“We don’t need to have fully 3D models in real space with full tracking. All we need to do is create the perception that’s what is happening.”
Mike opened a new whiteboard on his tablet and started sketching a new diagram.
“Look, we don’t need to use the camera’s spatial mapping. Instead we just put up the 2D animation and use the other sensors, the gyroscope and accelerometer.”
“So when the phone moves left, the ghost shifts right?”
“It’s a visual illusion. Not a serious anchoring, but it can be done much faster.”
Melina felt an intellectual recoil. This was a hacky workaround that completely sidestepped the technically correct approach to spatial computing. At the same time, this _was_ a hackathon.
“That would work. I could probably get it working in half-an-hour,” she said, feeling her stress start to melt. They were starting to get creative.
“Let’s make him fade away when you point the phone down, like he’s rising,” she added.
“Add some sound effects when that happens. a little poof,” Mike suggested.
Jack stood grumpily surveying his creation coming to life autonomously. San Francisco pulsed with light, everything rendered in photorealistic detail. Thousands of tiny dots moved throughout the streets and around buildings. Blue dots were cars. Yellow dots were busses. Red dots were trains. Green dots were e-bikes.
It was beautiful.
“It’s broken,” his prompt engineer complained.
“What does that mean?” Jack snapped.
“The traffic flow is working, but the logic isn’t correct. Look at this code.”
A window appeared with a block of code. There was a single function, dozens of lines long. The internal variables had cryptic names and the mathematical transformations lacked any comments explaining why it worked.
“Look at that function. CityTransit.Predictions.getVectors(). It doesn’t actually exist.”
“How are you getting the traffic data then?”
“The best approach is to query the city transit authority for a predictive model in real-time. But the city doesn’t have an API for that. The model just invented one. The entire simulation is running on hallucinations.”
“This is the third time,” Jack rolled his eyes. The AI was supposed to speed up development time, but only when its imagination didn’t get out of control. To it, if a piece was missing, it thought the best response was to fill in the gap.
Jack grabbed his microphone and spoke carefully into the model.
“We need to have a conversation about the transit flow optimization model.”
“Sure, how can I help? Should I summarize the code for you?” it replied as a line of text on the main screen.
“Your logic calls an external API in the CityTransit Predictions module. This does not exist in the project scope or municipal documentation.”
The cursor blinked for a long moment.
“This is correct. I do not see a CityTransit.Predictions module. I am sorry. How can I help?”
Jack pinched the bridge of his nose. A machine apologizing didn’t actually mean it. He wasn’t even sure if it even understood what he was trying to say.
“We need to work within existing constraints. Rebuild the entire traffic simulation. Do not use any external APIs unless explicitly told. You should only use public GPS transit feeds and historical traffic data sets. Your primary objective is to create a functional simulation based exclusively on real-world data.”
“I understand! I am rebuilding this module now,” it started to reply before lines of code streamed into the console. Based on the previous iteration of this, the entire module would take half an hour to be generated and cost another hefty amount in compute credits. All Jack could see now was an empty screen.
The later half of the hours rushed in a frantic blur. Soon enough there was only an hour left before the project had to be finished. The codebase and a basic description were to be uploaded to DevPost in addition to preparing a short demo for the judges.
Melina and Mike had reached a state of exhaustion that caused them to laugh giddily at any small thing. She had just pushed her final code commit and was busy fine-tuning the sound effects.
She tapped a key and a cartoonish spring boinged out of her speakers. The two of them cracked up again.
“That’s the stupidest sound I ever heard. We gotta put it in,” he nearly spit out his coffee.
“Already did,” she giggled.
“I’m adding a shimmering particle effect when the ghosts spawn in. It’s going to be super obnoxious.”
At this point they just wanted to add in as much ridiculous detail as they could before the deadline.
On the other side, Jack and the others stared at the stream of details coming out of the model. At this point, it seemed to be performing flawlessly, although they didn’t have a good way to verify it. The algorithms were busy optimizing traffic, but the way it did that was far over their head. Nobody would be able to understand the code that had been generated.
“If we show the judges this data stream it won’t mean anything,” Jack argued to this teammates. “This is just noise.”
“We could abstract it,” a teammate suggested. “What if we create a Civic Health Score as a percentage. We give it a color from red to green depending on how high it is. We shouldn’t care about the user experience anyway. The power is all in the backend.”
When the top of the hour hit, everyone took away their hands from the keyboards. The celebrity judges came out, a collection of people known for their contributions to open source or venture capital.
Jack and his team were the first ones to present. He walked up to the platform with a quiet confidence and reached the podium.
“Hello, and thank you for being here on an early Sunday morning. I’m sure the judges here are excited to see what I have to share. My team’s pitch is that urban management does not need to be built upon incremental improvements. Using the latest AI models, we have built a digital twin system which intelligently manages the millions of people who travel through the city every day.”
Behind him, the projector displayed a hyperrealistic map of San Francisco. The graphics looked photoreal, but every moving object had an ethereal glow of different colors. It was mesmerizing. Jack grabbed the microphone from its stand and walked back to the projection, walking them through the demo and how everything could be managed efficiently with the algorithm that had been prompted into existence. And in the top-right corner was the Civic Health score in a bright green.
“We aim to have this project connect us together in ways previously impossible,” Jack concluded.
The simulation zoomed out, showing the entire city pulsing like a single organism.
“Our goal is a city that is smart, yes, but more importantly alive.”
The crowd clapped hard at the end of the presentation, deeply impressed by the amount of progress that had been achieved in such a short period of time.
Melina and Mike approached the podium with some reservations. Mike let out a loud yawn. Neither one had gotten much sleep. Their hair was a mess and their clothes were full of wrinkles. Melina set her laptop down on a side table and plugged the HDMI cable into the side. She waited until the projector connected and then gave a short nod to Mike.
“Good morning everyone,” Mike greeted the crowd. Then he paused to rub his eyes. “We spent the last twenty-four hours writing every line of code in our project by hand. We built something fun, and we had a lot of fun building it. This is called ‘Memeory Lane’.”
He grabbed the microphone and stepped over to the laptop, which was mirroring his phone screen.
“Our game is for those people who want to share something funny with their neighbors even if you’re not there at the same time.”
The app loaded and in the middle of the screen was a camera interface. He raised the phone and pointed it at the judge’s table.
When he tapped the screen, a poof could be heard. Particles rained down from overhead and a cartoon dog appeared on the table with a bowler hat and a mug of coffee. The dog sat in a room engulfed in fire and said, via a speech bubble, “This is fine”.
The judges let out a soft chuckle. The crowd let out a mix of soft laughter at first, but it quickly grew into a loud roar. The reaction was so sudden it even caught Melina off-guard, causing her to double over in laughter as well.
“I’m glad we could all understand the value of this right away. It’s sharing a little joke in the real world.”
They shared a few more aspects of the demo, some goofy animations and sounds, but it was clear they had already captured the heart of the audience.
After a few minutes of deliberation, the judges walked up on the stage. The head judge, a ruthless venture capitalist, grabbed the microphone. The others stood quietly behind her.
“I want to thank both of our competitors here today. Matching humans and machines with so much on the line made it quite difficult for us to come to a decision. However, we quickly arrived at a consensus. The first place winner, and the recipient of a million-dollar seed round goes to...
“Team AI and their urban digital twin.”
There was polite applause from the crowd as Jack climbed onto the stage. He accepted an oversized check and a small trophy with a professional smile before walking off.
“However, we also came to another decision. Although it did not have the same technical execution, the Memeory Lane app clearly has won the crowd. We want to give a second place prize to that team. Please come up.”
Melina and Mike looked at each other, stunned, as the loud cheering audience members pushed the two of them towards the stage.
“Melina and Mike, I’m going to give you my card. Come by some time this week. Although I can’t promise a million, I want to help you bring your idea to reality.”
Although the VC’s validation was fine, they were surprised by all of their peers crowding around, asking for the download link so they could try out the app for themselves. People eagerly started placing memes all over the pier. Melina and Mike realized they had really hit on something.
As the crowd started thinning, the two of them wandered over to Jack, who was still holding the polished trophy in his hands.
“Congrats Jack,” Melina said in a conciliatory tone.
“I suppose so,” he mused.
“You don’t seem happy you won. But you should be proud. You build a perfect city.”
“It’s true, I did. But you built a neighborhood.”