An open-source hackathon operating system for students — from theme drop to podium.
🔴 Live: bharath-0814.github.io/HackPilot — no clone, no install, works on your phone right now.
Every team has AI now; "we used AI" differentiates nothing. What still wins hackathons is judgment: picking the right scope, engineering one wow moment, freezing early, rehearsing, and never letting a judge see a surprise. HackPilot turns that judgment into running tools.
Claim big. Build small. The demo cannot fail.
| Page | What it does |
|---|---|
index.html |
Landing — the doctrine and the map |
phases.html |
The core: every phase in working detail — goals, exact moves, the prompt to fire, pitfalls, done-checklists |
forge.html |
Prompt forge — fill your event once, 11 battle-tested AI prompts generate pre-filled (director, every phase, builder+auditor pair, team baton-pass) |
warroom.html |
Mission control — live countdown with phase orders, interactive checklists, a judge self-scorecard, on-stage panic protocols |
rehearse.html |
Demo teleprompter — your script against a pace clock; three clean runs = stage-ready |
playbook.html |
Techniques — sponsor-prize arbitrage, the wow-moment catalog, stagecraft, Q&A judo, the Ten Laws |
template/ |
Crash-proof starter app — dark-glass vanilla UI + demosafe.js (every fetch: timeout → seed fallback; silent Ctrl+Shift+P panic mode) |
Open index.html in any browser. That's it — no build step, no dependencies, no
accounts, works offline. All tool state lives in your browser's localStorage (and the
tools still run in hosts that block storage — they just don't persist there).
- GitHub Pages: push this folder → Settings → Pages → deploy from branch. Done.
- Netlify: drag the folder onto netlify.com/drop.
- Vercel:
vercelin this folder.
Fork it for your campus club, put your college's name on it, add your own prompts.
- Every page is self-contained. One HTML file = markup + styles + logic. No shared bundles, no imports, no CDN. A first-year with Notepad can modify any page.
- No build step, ever. If a change requires npm, it's the wrong change.
- Storage is optional. Every
localStorageaccess goes through a try/catch shim — the tools must run in sandboxed webviews and locked-down school machines. - The demo cannot fail applies to this site too: designed empty states, no dead
buttons,
prefers-reduced-motionrespected.
Built by a student who ships by directing AI coding agents, using exactly the process this site teaches — the AI wrote the lines, the decisions (scope, cuts, design, what got deleted) were human. The prompt trail that built it is the same kind of log the site tells you to keep for judges.
MIT. Take it, fork it, win with it. If it helped you place — tell someone else about it; that's the whole point.