🏦 Vaya: an AI loan advisor that asks whether you can still afford to live

around the question people are actually asking, which is: if I take this, can I still live?

🔗 Live demo:

<MagicBento /> for the feature grid

A few things I enjoyed building more than expected: the reverse-auction board has no AI in it at all — it is a forum, and forums already work. The whole survival engine is pure functions, which meant the report generator could reuse it without a single API call. And retrofitting dark mode onto a 5,500-line stylesheet that three people were editing daily turned out to be the hardest CSS problem of the project, by a distance.

Where it came from

Vaya was built for the Alibaba Cloud FSI Hackathon by a team of four. Results are announced on 11 August, which means it is currently in that nice window where I can only improve the parts nobody is judging.

If you want the longer story of how it was built — the product decisions, the tooling, what we got wrong — the team wrote it up here:

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I would like your eyes on it

Genuinely, not rhetorically — the demo is open and takes about two minutes:

vaya-project.vercel.app

Three things I am unsure about and would love to be argued with on:

1. 
   Is the survival score legible to someone who is not a finance person? It is the most valuable thing in the product and the easiest thing to over-engineer into noise. Try it and tell me whether the number means anything to you.


2. 
   Does the reverse-auction marketplace feel like something you would actually use, or like a mechanic that only makes sense to the people who built it?


3. 
   Chat-first homepage — right call or annoying? We deliberately did not build a landing page with a "Get Started" button. Some people love it. Some people scroll looking for the marketing site.

Drop a comment with what broke, what confused you, or what you would cut. I will reply to all of them.