Intertec Vibeathon: Code, Creativity, and AI by the Lake

From August 9th to August 11th, Intertec hosted a special internal event in one of Macedonia’s most inspiring locations, Ohrid. The weekend marked our first Ohrid VajbaТ (Intertec Vibeathon). It was 48 hours of coding, experimenting, and plenty of coffee with a simple goal: build, test, and push ourselves in a new way, and maybe even rethink how we use AI in development.

The Event Setup

The goal of the event was clear but ambitious: Replace most of our internal tools with a unified, AI-powered solution.

To tackle this challenge, we brought together 30 Intertec colleagues from different departments and divided them into 8 cross-functional teams. Over the course of two intense days, the teams designed, built, and tested various modules for a potential all-in-one internal platform.

The results:

• 36,992 lines of code written;
• 138 React components built;
• 8 project modules completed;
• €40k in potential yearly savings;

Between the sprints were those little things that make hackathons, such as: late-night brainstorming, quick problem-solving sessions, and those "yes, it finally works!" moments that make the effort worthwhile.

Trying Out AI-native Development

One of the big focuses this year was experimenting with Lovable, a tool for AI-native development. It was a live test: could we really go from idea to working components with AI as our co-pilot?

We quickly learned a few things:

• Prompts must be crystal clear. If you're vague, you'll pay for it later.
• Multi-team work isn't there yet. Lovable doesn't support multi-branching, which slowed us down.
• Real-time updates were a win. Thanks to Supabase, teams could work in parallel without overwriting each other.

Even with the quirks, the productivity boost was real. Four out of six modules were done in two days, with 80% of functionality working. Sure, we had to rely on Cursor for some flows and setup took forever, but it convinced us that AI-native coding actually works in practice.

More than the code

The best part was watching people who'd never worked together before suddenly clicking with each other. You'd see someone from design explaining their process to a developer, or engineers getting excited about a new UX idea.

On top of that, the setting greatly helped, too. Ohrid's calm atmosphere gave the whole event a unique vibe, focused when we needed it, relaxed when we didn't. The combination of hard work, creative freedom, and a few laughs in between made the experience bigger than just a hackathon.

A Weekend That Points Forward

By the end, we had three working apps - a good start toward replacing all our scattered tools with something unified. However, what people are still talking about is what they learned and the connections they made. What surprised everyone was how fast things moved when people had the freedom to just build without the usual roadblocks. It turns out that 48 hours of experimentation got everyone energized about what we could build together.