Hackonnect: AI-Powered Hackathon Co-Pilot

Project Overview

HackFlow is an intelligent co-pilot for hackathons. It streamlines the entire lifecycle: discovering relevant hackathons, generating and refining ideas, visualizing project flows, assembling teams, collaborating live, and gathering AI-curated resources—reducing friction and accelerating innovation.

Inspiration

Common pain points:

• Idea paralysis
• Noisy hackathon discovery
• Team formation friction
• Unstructured planning
• Hard-to-find APIs/datasets
• Lack of competitive insight

HackFlow solves these with focused AI assistance and collaborative tooling.

Core Features

🚀 AI Hackathon Finder

• Uses Perplexity (sonar-pro) to fetch and rank hackathons (Devpost, Devfolio, DoraHacks, etc.)
• Personalized by interests, themes, tech focus

💡 AI Idea Generator

• Deep research (sonar-deep-research) to expand prompts into:
  • Problem framing
  • Use cases
  • Feature sets
  • Suggested stacks

🗺 Project Flowchart Generator

• Transforms ideas into interactive flow diagrams via React Flow
• Modules, dependencies, data flow

🛠 AI Resource Hub

• Curated APIs, datasets, tools, learning links
• Structured JSON responses for consistent rendering

🔍 Competitive Analysis (Concept / Partial)

• Planned: Compare against past winners for uniqueness and impact

👥 Team Collaboration

• Team profiles (skills, roles, availability)
• Real-time chat (Socket.IO)
• Skill- & interest-based teammate discovery (roadmap)

🔐 Authentication

• Clerk for secure session + user management

🔄 Real-Time

• Socket.IO channel per team for chat & presence

📊 Sustainability / Impact (Planned Extension)

• Future scoring for environmental and social impact

Technical Architecture

Frontend

• Next.js (App Router), React, TypeScript
• Tailwind + Shadcn UI
• Client + Server Components composition
• React Flow for diagramming

Backend / API

• Next.js API Routes (serverless)
• AI orchestration layer wrapping Perplexity endpoints
• Structured prompt templates + response validators

AI Integration

• Perplexity API:
  • sonar-pro: listing + resources
  • sonar-deep-research: idea expansion
• (Pluggable design for future models)

Data Layer

• NeonDB (Serverless PostgreSQL)
• Prisma (type-safe queries, migrations)
• Models: Idea, TeamMessage, TeamProfile (+ extensible)

Realtime Layer

• Socket.IO namespace per team
• Graceful reconnect + broadcast

Auth

• Clerk JWT session
• Middleware guards on protected routes