3-Sentence Demo Pitch

Judges remember wedges and moments. They forget features. Write three sentences. No more.

Rewrite each sentence until it is under 20 words. Count them.

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Sentence 1 — The wedge

"When you try to do ______ today, ______ breaks."

The wedge names the pain. It must name a real moment a developer has had this week, not a vague industry trend.

Good wedges:

• "When you add a timestamp to your system prompt, you silently burn your entire Anthropic cache on every call."
• "When an agent fails at step 7 of 12 at 3am, your options are cry or start over."

Bad wedges:

• "AI is hard." (too abstract)
• "Developers need better tools." (everyone says this)

Sentence 2 — The move

"We built ______ that ______."

One noun (the thing you built) and one verb (what it does for the user). No adjectives. No "powered by", no "leveraging", no "enterprise-grade".

Good moves:

• "We built CacheScope, a CLI that diffs two API calls and shows you the line of code that cost you money."
• "We built CheckpointKit, a decorator that makes any LangGraph agent resumable from the last successful node."

Bad moves:

• "We built an AI-powered platform that leverages cutting-edge agent orchestration…" (say it out loud — you'll hate it)

Sentence 3 — The moment

"Watch this." → 60-second live demo.

Do not say anything else before the demo runs. Let the demo be the argument.

The live demo must match the Demo moment field from your spec, word for word. If they diverge, one of them is wrong — fix it now.

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Judge Q&A prep

Write one sentence per answer. If you can't answer in one sentence, that's the weak spot in your hack. Flag it and rehearse it.

The standard five

1. How does this scale?

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2. Why not just use [nearest existing tool]?

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3. What happens when the LLM hallucinates?

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4. Who pays for this?

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5. What's your moat?

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The hack-specific three

Add 2–3 questions specific to your hack. Think about what would happen if a skeptic in the front row wanted to embarrass you:

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Dry-run checklist

Before Phase 4 can close:

• Each of the 3 sentences is under 20 words (count them)
• Sentence 3's live demo matches your spec's Demo moment
• All 5 standard Q&A answered in one line
• Pitch run out loud, once, with a timer — under 2 minutes total