At several events in the Boston area, I heard talk of something called the Sundai Club, a weekly AI hackathon for MIT and Harvard students. At the AI Tinkerers group, I saw some of their projects and I was impressed. This blog post is about the club and what I’ve observed from their presentations and from their code.
What impressed me
During the AI Tinkerers event, I saw several demos of “products” created by small teams of Sandai Club undergraduate students in 12 hours. Of course, all of the demos used AI, either to do processing in the background and/or for code generation. These demos were good enough to clearly demonstrate a value proposition.
Let me repeat this because it’s important. A small group of undergraduate students are regularly building working prototypes in 12 hours. The impressive thing is the productivity and the quality coming from students.
Of course, the output is a prototype, but with AI, they’ve got a substantial productivity boost. All the UIs looked good and all the prototypes did something interesting.
I was impressed enough to dig deeper, hence this review.
How the club operates
This is a student club for MIT and Harvard students. It meets every Sunday from 10am to 10pm for a full day’s hacking. Not all the 12 hours is spent hacking, there’s a sunset run and presentations. Some of the sessions are sponsored by AI companies or companies in the adjacent space. Sponsorship often means providing free compute resources for example, computing power or hosting etc.
They have a website you can visit: https://www.sundai.club/
My review of their code
Most of the projects are posted on the website and of those, most have GitHub pages where you can view the code. I spent some time dissecting several projects to figure out what’s going on. Here are my thoughts.
Code quality is surprisingly good. It’s readable and well-structured. Is this because it’s at least partly AI generated? Probably.
Code length is surprisingly short. You can read over all the code for one of these projects in less than 10 minutes.
Notably, they do use a lot of “new” services. This includes newer libraries and newer hosting services. This is a hidden benefit: their development speed isn’t just from AI, it’s from using the right (non-AI) tools.
LLM connections are simple. It’s just API calls and prompts. This was the surprise for me, I was expecting something more complicated.
Importantly, they use agentic AI IDEs. Cursor was the one I saw used the most, but I’ve heard of projects using Lovable and I’m sure there’s Windsurf usage too. In fact, a Sundai club presentation was the first time I saw people “vibe coding” using voice (via the Whisper add-on). Agentic IDEs seem to be key to the productivity gains I saw.
Why is this so interesting
- They’re producing prototype “products” in less than 12 hours with a small team. This would have taken more than two or three weeks in the past.
- The quality of the code is high. It’s at least as good as some professional code.
- They’re using the latest libraries, IDEs, and tools. They really are on the cutting edge.
Next steps
The most obvious thing you can do is visit their website: https://www.sundai.club/ and view some of their projects.
If you’re in the Boston area, you can often catch Sundai Club presentations at the AI Tinkerers group, which is open to anyone: https://boston.aitinkerers.org/
No comments:
Post a Comment