procrasti-NATION

Excuse Engine: Find thrilling excuses to your tasks!
View a history of avoidance!
Lock in when you really need to

Inspiration

At one point in our lives, we’ve all been procrastinators, so we figured, why not create a site that brings out the laziness in all of us? You no longer need to feel pressured into doing something you dread, procrasti-NATION understands you.

💻 What it does

A feature that provides you excuses for procrastinating on your tasks with an urgency classifier, whether you want excuses that are either absurd, scientific, or emotional, we’ve got you covered
A page that stores all your past excuse requests, to see visibly how much you’ve procrastinated (hopefully guilting you into being productive)
A page to encourage you to start the tasks you’ve been dreading, because it has to be done eventually! There are encouraging quotes and

⚙️ How we built it

To build procasti-NATION, we used REACTJS and Tailwind CSS for the frontend, and we used MongoDB as well as Cohere's Chat and Classify APIs for the backend. Cohere's LLM was mainly used to prompt custom excuses for specific tasks of a user. However, we also trained it with data to classify the urgency of a user's task. MongoDB Atlas was used in order to store the history of a users prompts and answers with their urgencies and dates which makes it simple to sort and search for data. Let it also be known that a Costco family-sized bag of All-Dressed Ruffles was especially crucial to this building journey.

🤔 Challenges we ran into

we found training the model to be quite time-consuming
we had to learn our way around APIs (this wasn't too difficult, but it was something new)
we had some difficulty publishing our project

🔭 Accomplishments that we're proud of

We all took turns staring into space out of confusion while creating the excuse engine, so you can imagine our joy when it finally gave us an excuse other than ‘Sorry, I need to walk my pet goldfish’. We worked hard at prompt engineering for the Cohere Chat API Model to get it to work the way we wanted it to, and we were really satisfied with how it turned out. Needless to say, successfully implementing this model into our project was one of the best parts of this journey.

What we learned

On the technological side, we learned how to integrate backend and frontend code, as well as how to implement APIs. We learned how to use prompt engineering to do a DIY version of training an LLM.

Otherwise, we learned that procrastinating a hackathon project maybe wasn't the best idea (is it too soon?). On a serious note, we learned how to better work with each other and the importance of planning out projects before executing them. We definitely look forward to applying what we learned here to future hackathons, projects and other endeavors.

What's next for procrasti-NATION

We believe there’s a pretty bright future ahead of procrasti-NATION. We look forward to introducing procrastinator-only forums, implementing more technologies to diversify the site, partnerships, monetization opportunities, and more! Our target market is widespread across demographics, and so we look forward to exploring what’s in store for us (is procrasti-UNIVERSE next? Stay tuned…).