An open-source hackathon operating system: every phase mapped in detail, AI prompts that forge themselves around your event, a mission-control dashboard, a demo rehearsal machine, and a starter template whose demo structurally cannot crash. Everyone has AI now — the edge is judgment, scope, and craft. That's what this teaches.
Every team on every table has the same models. "We used AI" differentiates nothing. What still wins: picking the right scope, engineering one wow moment, freezing early, and rehearsing. HackPilot operationalizes exactly those.
You get sorted in the first 45 seconds of a 3-minute demo. So everything here optimizes one objective: the demo cannot fail — from the fetch layer that silently falls back to seed data, to the panic cards for when wifi dies on stage.
Drivers change mid-race — sleep shifts, dead sessions, tool limits. The relay protocol keeps the project's whole memory in repo files, so handing everything to a teammate takes two minutes, not an hour of re-explaining.
Every phase, step by step, with pitfalls and done-checklists →
Fill your event once — 11 battle-tested AI prompts generate pre-filled: director, every phase, builder + auditor pair, baton pass, resume.
Live countdown with phase orders, interactive checklists, a brutal judge self-scorecard, and panic protocols for on-stage failures.
Your script beat by beat against a pace clock. Three clean runs, 20% under the slot — that's stage-ready. It counts your runs.
Dark-glass vanilla app that looks shipped at hour 1. Every fetch has a timeout → seed-data fallback, plus a silent panic key for live demos.
MIT licensed. Pure HTML/CSS/JS — no build step, no dependencies, no accounts.
Push this folder to GitHub, turn on Pages, and your campus has its own copy in sixty
seconds. Add your college's prompts, translate the playbook, extend the template —
see CONTRIBUTING.md. Built by a student who ships with AI, for students
who ship with AI: the AI writes the lines, you make the decisions — and this
site teaches the decisions.