Where Were You? How AI and Human Instinct Built Wereabouts at Pointless Palooza 2026

A team of three at Viget's Pointless Palooza 2026 hackathon built Wereabouts, a map-based app that visualizes where people have lived over time and highlights location overlaps within communities. In 12 hours, they used AI tools (Claude, Bolt, Gemini, Granola, V0) for ideation, naming, branding, and prototyping, while relying on human judgment for architecture decisions, tech stack choices, and product strategy. Key insight: AI rapidly generates options but humans make the strategic calls that determine whether something is worth building. The team shipped branding guidelines, an interactive prototype, and a live Rails app on AWS in roughly six hours of actual work.