The Good Bag is submitted. Now comes the hardest part: not fixing it.

The hackathon happened. The bag got built, the build got submitted, and somewhere in the gap between those two sentences I slept for what felt like a full week. This is the follow-up nobody asked for and I am writing anyway, because if I don't write it down I will just reorganise the same regrets in a different order every night.

Quick recap for anyone joining late: I got into Lovable SheBuilds to build The Good Bag, a place for busy parents to find and compare fun, thoughtful things children might actually keep — for kids' party bags, without hours of searching, cheap plastic tat, or overspending. The plan was three nights, after work and after bedtime. The plan mostly survived contact with reality.

The honest version: building between roughly 10pm and 4am is genuinely fun and slightly addictive. There is something about the house going quiet that makes 'one more screen' feel completely reasonable. I would sit down 'for an hour' and look up at 2am with a finished flow and no memory of designing half of it.

"Would I do it again? Absolutely. Could I keep doing this every night? Definitely not."

What got built

A working first version. You can pick fillers for ten five-year-olds at £5 a head and end up with a bag that makes sense. You can try it at The Good Bag.

The scoreboard, for people who like numbers: three days, around 18 hours of building, 279 messages with Lovable AI, and 451 credits. I had genuinely budgeted 300. The credits were not the thing that ran out — sleep was. And unlike credits, sleep does not come with a top-up button.

Three problems worth keeping

The best souvenir from a hackathon is not the demo. It is the list of things the product got wrong, because that list is the roadmap.

None of these are bugs you fix in an evening. They are definition problems: what counts as an item, what the recommendations should optimise for, how money actually behaves. Which is exactly the work I like, and exactly the work that needs more than a deadline's worth of attention.

I finished early. Then the real challenge started

Somewhere on the last night I realised I was going to make it. Not everything I wanted, but a coherent version of the thing: pick a budget, pick the kids, get a bag you would be happy handing over at a birthday party. So I submitted. There was a tick. The tick was very green.

And then, immediately, the second-guessing started. Not the dramatic kind — the quiet, 11pm kind, where you remember a screen you could have simplified, a label you could have sharpened, an idea that would have tied the whole thing together. Every fix is now filed in my head under 'next time', and the file is not small.

Here is the trap: the competition build is frozen until the results are announced, and changing it would risk disqualification. So my new assignment is to collect feedback and not touch the product. For a designer, this is possibly the hardest challenge of all. The hackathon was easy by comparison; 'don't fix it' is the boss level.

What now

Now I wait for the results, and I am using the space differently than I expected. With the build frozen, I stopped fixing things in my head and started asking the better question: what is The Good Bag actually for, once the competition is over? Not the hackathon version. The version that survives contact with real parents, real budgets and the third week of term.

If you try it, tell me where it helps and where it doesn't. Right now, your feedback is the most useful thing I can collect — and the only thing on the project I am allowed to touch.