We Built a VS Code Extension at the Cursor Hackathon

This past weekend me and Vusal Huseynov joined a hackathon run by Cursor Community. After my previous hackathon experience I wasn’t really planning to do another one, but seeing it was by Cursor Community specifically made me want to try.

Our idea: a VS Code extension that helps develop stronger engineers in today’s vibe-coding era.

How it works — install the extension, give it your GitHub or LinkedIn, it analyzes your background and skills, generates questions, and continuously learns from how you perform. Based on your results, it creates topic areas for your weak spots. Then you ask it questions and learn directly inside Cursor without ever leaving.

For example, say you want to learn CQRS Pattern — it builds a plan for you, defines the steps, and guides you through. It doesn’t write the code for you. The point is to make you actually learn by doing.

What sets it apart from Copilot: when you ask Copilot something, it implements it — it doesn’t teach you. That might look impressive, but for someone in a learning phase it actually stunts growth. Copilot writes code. Accelode builds engineers.

We did the full thing — presentation, deployment, published on open-vsx.org. During the demo we showed it live, opened the open-vsx page, and it already had 134 downloads despite being live for only 5 hours. The judges asked “did you build this today?” and “is open-vsx your website?” — which honestly said everything about how seriously this hackathon was being run.

The winner was a project that checks whether emails are phishing. With Google’s MailShield having existed for years, I genuinely don’t understand how that took 1st place with a 95-point score when Innovation & Originality was supposed to be 15 points.

Disappointing, but a good experience regardless.

Project: https://shorturl.at/fl7pH