This past weekend I took part in Monad's Blitz hackathon, part of Belgrade Blockchain Week, co-hosted with Tenderly.
I haven't done blockchain in a while, and I went in with one expectation: have a fun time and meet a few new people. Somehow I came out with 2nd place.
After the hackathon started, I think we spent 90% of our time going through ideas and shooting them down, one after another. On the surface that looks like wasted time, but for us I think it is exactly what got us there in the end. The time from an idea to a working app has been cut so short by tools like Claude Code and Codex that the idea and the approach are the only two moats left.
The last times we competed in events like this, we aimed for something technically complex and challenging, to show people we could pull it off. That is not what sets you apart anymore. Anyone can take an idea they find interesting, hand it to Claude Code, and have a working app by the end of the day. The hard part now is coming up with that idea yourself.
Big thanks to Teodor Jakovljević and Zorana Savanović.