I Took My Mom to a Hackathon

This summer I went to two small Cursor hackathons in Helsinki, both at Maria 01, both with roughly 90 minutes to make something before showing it to the room. The first time I went alone and built a 3D luxury sauna app. There was no grand startup thesis behind it. I was mostly curious how far I could push the tools in one afternoon, and it was slightly absurd how far they let me go. Something that not long ago would have meant planning, assets, frontend work, 3D work, debugging and probably a few lost evenings was suddenly just something I could try because I felt like trying it.

A few weeks later I went back, but this time I took my mom. We had recently travelled together to Venice for the Architecture Biennale, and instead of inventing another product we started rebuilding parts of that trip as a 3D memory space. Places we had seen, little fragments of Venice, the feeling of moving through exhibitions together. It was not really useful in the normal software sense. There was no market for it and no reason anyone else needed it. It was useful to us.

I keep thinking about that difference. The first hackathon showed me that AI can make software much faster. The second one made me wonder what happens when software becomes cheap enough that usefulness itself can become more human. If making something no longer requires weeks of work or a budget, then perhaps we can make things for much smaller reasons. For one person. For one relationship. For a moment we do not want to lose.

For most of the history of software, the cost of making it forced us toward scale. A product needed users, a business model, a sufficiently large problem. That made economic sense, but it also meant that an enormous amount of small human desire could never become software. Nobody was going to hire a development team to build a tiny digital world about a trip with their mother.

Now I could.

And I feel there is something important hiding there. We talk so much about AI replacing programmers, generating apps, increasing productivity, making companies more efficient. Those things are real, but they are still basically asking what happens when we apply a new technology to the old economic logic. Perhaps the stranger possibility is that the economics change enough that we start making different kinds of things entirely.

The first time I made a luxury sauna. The second time I made a place for a memory with my mom. I know which one I care about more.

Maybe one of the best things about abundant software will be that not everything has to become a product anymore.

Connected reading

• Software for One Afternoon
• An App Too Small to Exist

AI authorship note

This note began with Kris Haamer remembering two Cursor hackathons in Helsinki and describing what he built at each one. Gmail was used to recover the dates, venue, organizer and format. AI helped recover context, draft, edit and publish the note. Kris supplied the experiences, framing and judgment about which build mattered more, and approved this version for publication.