{"slug": "i-thought-i-could-build-it-in-9-days-i-was-wrong", "title": "I Thought I Could Build It in 9 Days I Was Wrong", "summary": "A developer chronicled a 9-day hackathon attempt to build Hack Hydra, a project for the HydraDB hackathon, which ended in failure due to over-scoping, limited resources, and debugging challenges. The developer burned through credits on seven Codex accounts and Replit, faced API limits, and struggled with an old laptop, ultimately learning that vibe coding accelerates building but does not eliminate debugging, architecture, or time constraints. The experience taught the developer to scope projects realistically and prioritize working features over ambitious additions.", "body_md": "9 days.\n\n7 Codex accounts.\n\nMultiple free credits exhausted.\n\nReplit credits gone.\n\nAPI limits.\n\nAn old laptop with 8GB RAM and basically no storage left.\n\nBarely any sleep.\n\nAnd somehow… I still kept building.\n\nI started Hack Hydra, a 9-day HydraDB hackathon, thinking I had enough time and resources to build something ambitious.\n\nSpoiler: I absolutely did not. 😅\n\nI started with Codex and burned through the free credits across all 7 of my accounts.\n\nThen I moved to Replit and used those credits too.\n\nAt that point, my backend was around 80% done.\n\nFrontend?\n\nStill pending.\n\nOverall?\n\nMaybe 40% of the project was actually complete.\n\nAnd I had basically no credits left anywhere.\n\nThen I found Freebuff, which gave me 6 free sections every day. That genuinely helped me keep moving.\n\nBut then came the API limits.\n\nAnd this is where I started realizing how badly I had planned this.\n\nClaude kept warning me:\n\n“You’re over-scoping.”\n\n“This probably isn’t buildable in the available time.”\n\nAnd honestly, my mindset was basically:\n\n“Fuck man, I know. Your job is to follow my commands, not tell me what’s possible.”\n\nI thought this was vibe coding.\n\nI thought if I could describe what I wanted, AI would just build it.\n\nAnd building the code itself actually wasn't the hardest part.\n\nDebugging was.\n\nI’d say almost 70% of my time went into debugging.\n\nChecking logs.\n\nReading errors.\n\nFiguring out why an API wasn't working.\n\nTesting the backend manually.\n\nFixing one thing.\n\nBreaking another.\n\nRunning it again.\n\nThen there was the design work.\n\nThen connecting everything together.\n\nThen testing again.\n\nA feature that sounds like:\n\n«“This should be easy.”»\n\ncan turn into:\n\n«“Why the fuck is this returning an error?”»\n\nfor the next few hours.\n\nAnd I kept adding more.\n\nMore features.\n\nMore complexity.\n\nMore things the project “should” have.\n\nI wasn't just building a project anymore.\n\nI was building something that was way too complicated for the time, credits, hardware and resources I actually had.\n\nThen my laptop started fighting me too.\n\nIt's 5 years old.\n\n8GB RAM.\n\nStorage completely full.\n\nRunning the project and manually testing the backend on it was painful.\n\nAnd somehow I kept going.\n\nThen the final 2 days arrived.\n\nAnd almost nothing was working.\n\nNo proper demo video.\n\nStill debugging.\n\nStill fixing.\n\nStill trying.\n\nOne day left.\n\nStill nothing.\n\nThen the final 12 hours.\n\nBarely any sleep.\n\nAt that point, I finally stopped trying to convince myself that everything would magically come together.\n\nI started accepting the situation.\n\nI went to sleep.\n\nWoke up.\n\nOpened my laptop.\n\nAnd after 9 days of hard work…\n\nmy app was broken.\n\nThat hurt.\n\nI couldn't even make the demo video.\n\nI didn't finish what I imagined on Day 1.\n\nBut after accepting that, something interesting happened.\n\nI started looking for the next hackathon.\n\nAnd while doing that, I found an idea for my next project.\n\nThat's when I realized this 9-day journey actually gave me something much more useful than another finished project.\n\nI learned how I need to build.\n\nNext time:\n\nNot just “I have 9 days, let's build.”\n\nI need to understand what is actually possible with the time, hardware, APIs and resources I have.\n\nThe goal should be to have something working well before the deadline, not to still be building the foundation on the final day.\n\nNot at the last minute when everything is on fire.\n\nGet one feature working.\n\nThen ask: Do I actually have enough time for another?\n\nIf yes, add it.\n\nIf not, ship what already works.\n\nVibe coding makes building faster.\n\nIt doesn't remove debugging.\n\nIt doesn't remove architecture.\n\nIt doesn't remove testing.\n\nIt doesn't remove design.\n\nAnd it definitely doesn't remove time constraints.\n\nI've done a 50-day buildathon.\n\nI've done week-long hackathons.\n\nI've done 3 months of 11Labs hackathons.\n\nBut this 9-day hackathon taught me something different.\n\nSometimes the biggest lesson doesn't come from successfully shipping.\n\nSometimes it comes from spending 9 days finding out exactly why you couldn't ship.\n\nI got cooked by this hackathon. 🔥\n\nBut I also learned a lot.\n\nAnd now I have an idea for the next one.\n\nHopefully this time…\n\nI actually plan before I start cooking. 😭", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/i-thought-i-could-build-it-in-9-days-i-was-wrong", "canonical_source": "https://dev.to/gowtham_jayavarapu/i-thought-i-could-build-it-in-9-days-i-was-wrong-1j0g", "published_at": "2026-08-21 07:12:09+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-08-21 07:44:15.543486+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["developer-tools", "artificial-intelligence"], "entities": ["Codex", "Replit", "Freebuff", "Claude", "Hack Hydra", "HydraDB"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/i-thought-i-could-build-it-in-9-days-i-was-wrong", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/i-thought-i-could-build-it-in-9-days-i-was-wrong.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/i-thought-i-could-build-it-in-9-days-i-was-wrong.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/i-thought-i-could-build-it-in-9-days-i-was-wrong.jsonld"}}