I applied to YC three times. The first two were rejections. Not close calls, just... no. And honestly, looking back at those applications, fair enough. The ideas were half-baked and I hadn't proven I could ship anything real yet.

But eventually, I finally got a chance to go to San Francisco, and more specifically, YC's headquarters in San Francisco for their 2025 Agent Jam hackathon.

My team and I spent all day and night trying to vibe code our way through this. We bought Cursor Pro subscriptions, Claude Code Max subscriptions, and just really everything that we could think of in order to win this hackathon, but nothing came together until the morning.

What we realized was the key to building with AI isn't prompting mindlessly; it's having a strategy in the way you converse with your tools.

  1. Ask the tool to understand the repo.
  2. Ask if it understands the request.
  3. Have it build.

You cannot have it build just on your first prompt, especially not in the same chat as another feature. That causes context rot. Best of luck vibe coding!