Every AI app right now looks exactly the same: a clean white background, a polite assistant, and a text box. It’s getting a little boring.

I saw the Build with MeDo Hackathon (hosted by Baidu) was running this weekend, and I wanted to enter their "Surprise Us" category with something completely unhinged.

So, I built Noir AI: Dream Detective.

, Baidu's generative app builder.

I'm usually pretty skeptical of "prompt-to-app" tools, but this was actually wild. Instead of manually messing around with CSS to get the vintage look, I literally just prompted the MeDo engine: "Give me a split-screen layout, vintage typewriter fonts, charcoal and sepia colors, and a corkboard on the right."

It spat out a surprisingly solid React/CSS layout.

The trickiest part was wiring the logic. I had to tune the prompt so that the underlying ERNIE model wouldn't just reply with 1940s dialogue, but would also tag the weird nouns in my dream so the frontend could render them as visual clues.

Go get interrogated

Hackathons are the best excuse to build weird stuff you'd normally never have time for. If you want to see how far natural language app builders have come, definitely check out the MeDo platform.

🕵️‍♂️ Try the app here:

Drop your weirdest dream in the comments below. I want to see what kind of evidence board the detective makes for you. 👇

BuiltWithMeDo #WebDev #NoCode #GenerativeAI #WeekendProject