---
title: "Pathway Hackathon"
description: "Signing up for the Pathway RAG hackathon at IIT Jodhpur, picking the e-commerce chatbot problem statement, and dropping out before building it."
date: 2025-09-14
tags:
  - life
  - iit
---

So, I'm participating in this hackathon from [Pathway](https://pathway.com/framework/). It's in association with RAID x Product Club of IIT Jodhpur. The idea is cool where we use Pathway's already made features to make some projects. We have a few Problem Statements like, Healthcare Provider, E-commerce Giant, Financial Services,  Telecom Operator and EdTech Startup. And to be honest, I'm very excited for this to happen. Even if we don't finish the projects or anything, we will learn how to work as a team, how to solve little issues you face when making a fully-fledged application which will be served to many users around the Institute.

We have decided to take on the **E-commerce Giant** <span class='tooltip' data-tooltip="Problem Statement">PS</span>. In which, we have to make a RAG powered chat-bot, which works like a simple AI assistant, which would fetch your order details, issue a refund procedure or cancel the order for you by just messages. We would probably use Gemini API as the main LLM and RAG by Pathway on top of it to do the data processing and all. We still haven't figured out how we would get the dummy data for the project but we'll do something.

## How it actually went

We didn't continue. The team dropped out partway through and the RAG chatbot never got built.

Leaving this post up as-is because that's the honest version — plenty of hackathon writeups end at "we were so excited" and never tell you what happened. Most of the ones you sign up for end like this, not with a demo video. That's fine. The RAG stuff I was curious about here showed up again later in [what I learned about agentic architecture](/blogs/agentic-architecture), just outside a hackathon deadline.