solo > bad team

what happened

solo tbh very strong. benefits: no comms issues, no dependency issues, no presentation disagreements, when you win you actually feel it.

why it's a gotcha

there's pressure to team up at hackathons. "you need a team to win" is conventional wisdom. but a bad team is actively worse than solo — you spend more time coordinating than building, you make compromises that make the project worse, and if things go wrong, it feels worse because you gave up control.

the fix

if you don't find a team you're genuinely excited about, go solo. a focused solo builder who ships a working demo beats a dysfunctional team every time. the best teams are small and aligned; the worst teams are big and confused. what makes a team bad? no shared understanding, role confusion, personality clashes under pressure, being all coders with no communicator. the solution is to find the right team or go alone.