What’s up guys—this video is basically my annual TreeHacks arc: fly out at 5 a.m., show up with one backpack, and then try to build something insane on basically zero sleep. Last year we won TreeHacks by not sleeping at all, so this year we ran it back for the $10,000 grand prize. I walk through what I pack (battery bank, sleeping mask + earplugs, thick jacket, leaving room for free sponsor stuff), the travel day, check-in, the goodie bag, and then the moment hacking starts—aka the caffeine + snacks line into immediate “are we cooked?” energy. Project-wise, we built Mera: a conversational AI shopping assistant that lives on a smart mirror we assembled ourselves. The stack was Next.js on the frontend, Neon Postgres, and an AI agent built with the Claude Agents SDK. When you sign up, we scrape your email via Perplexity Sonar to infer purchase history/style, then Mera makes tool calls (Serper web search) to pull clothing options, standardizes images with Nano Banana, and overlays items in real time by tracking pose with MediaPipe. The real story though is the grind: losing my voice from “vibe coding,” fighting deployments (I literally switched approaches last-minute to deploy on Vercel), merging hardware + software at 2 a.m., and then somehow making judging happen. We were fried, but it worked—and we won TreeHacks 2026 for $10,000. Worth it… but I’m not recommending the 36-hours-no-sleep strat unless you’re ready for pain.