Sitecore Hackathon 2025: Team DED - My Thoughts and Review My Contributions

Hello friends! A few weekends ago, I participated in the Sitecore Hackathon 2025—a 24-hour event that starts at 7 PM on Friday and ends at 8 PM EST on Saturday. But wait, that's 25 hours? Well, the first hour is dedicated to brainstorming an idea based on the provided category. This year, our team—team DED (named by combining the first letters of team members Dylan, Dan Solovay, and Erica Stockwell-Alpert)—used that entire hour to develop our concept. The category gave us freedom to build anything we wanted. While we initially considered creating a CLI for IAR files, we ultimately settled on an idea that energized the whole team. I was particularly excited because it aligned with my work on the Sitecore Assistant and would expand the tool in a new direction (which I'll discuss later when covering the Hackathon outcomes).

The Idea

We decided to build something similar to the Sitecore Assistant tool, expanding upon a tool that Erica had developed for XM/XP. However, since Sitecore XM Cloud's landscape has changed and traditional package installation methods no longer work, we created an XM Cloud replacement—a separate Next.js application that integrates with both the XM Cloud Edge/Delivery APIs and the Authoring/Management APIs. The app's architecture allowed us to deploy it to Vercel (check it out here: https://sitecore-content-export.vercel.app). Taking inspiration from the Sitecore Assistant, we added a Copilot feature that pulls content from the Delivery/Edge API. Though we had to rush the interface, the potential is enormous. I particularly loved our tech stack choice—Next.js, Tailwind, and ShadCN for the UI. Even with my limited UI experience, I breezed through the interface development using Vibe code, and the results were fantastic.

My Overall Thoughts

This was definitely one of the best Hackathons I've ever experienced. With AI by my side, I never felt stuck—I could use it to overcome any obstacle. I primarily relied on GitHub Copilot, which proved invaluable for 90% of situations. Rather than getting bogged down wondering how to build something, I could simply ask how to refactor the code to achieve specific goals, and I was off to the races.

That said, Copilot Edits has its drawbacks—it frequently overwrote my changes, causing me to lose code, and its formatting leaves much to be desired. Still, Copilot's chat feature has been transformative for my productivity. When Copilot occasionally struggled, I turned to Claude 3.7, which was phenomenal for coding modifications. I could even attach photos and draw on them to illustrate the issues I was facing, and somehow it understood and resolved them perfectly.

AI particularly excels at UI work, and the latest models are clearly improving rapidly in this area. While I'm uncertain about when it might replace humans—I encountered some challenges with AI in another post-hackathon project—it proved to be an invaluable tool for enhancing the UI. I successfully created a stunning UI for the Chat app, which I'll definitely incorporate into future applications.

The Outcome

I was impressed with what we were able to create. I plan to make several improvements to both the Sitecore Assistant and this new application. For the app we built during the hackathon, I'll first enhance the API Instance configurator. The initial version was confusing, so I'm rebuilding it to be more flexible and allow for future Sitecore integrations, such as Personalize. While helping Erica enhance the Instance configuration, I also plan to bring more features into the original tool. I learned an important distinction between Session Storage and Local Storage—Session Storage only persists during the current browsing session, while Local Storage remains across multiple browsing sessions indefinitely. This storage functionality is one of the tool's features I'm most proud of, as it allows anyone to configure instances and start using them with their environments. Of course, if we pursue adding this to the Marketplace, we'll need to do additional development work to meet their requirements.

I plan to rename the Sitecore Assistant to Sitecore Copilot and transform it into a multi-agent tool that handles content, personalization, and future capabilities. I'll incorporate the UI we built for the Hackathon submission into Sitecore Copilot and develop advanced chat interfaces that integrate with other Sitecore systems. Additionally, I hope to bring the content-related copilot enhancements back into the Hackathon submission.

I'll share more details about these enhancements to the Sitecore Assistant (Copilot) in my next few posts. Overall, it was an excellent Hackathon experience—our team collaborated seamlessly, and I'm already excited for the next one.