How I Solved My Own Pain Point with AI: A Frontend Dev's GitLab Hackathon Diary

I recently submitted a project to the GitLab AI Hackathon 2026. Built it in 3 days. This isn't a tutorial or a "look what I built" post — it's a diary of what actually happened: the problem I found, how I thought about it, what I built, where I got stuck, and what I walked away understanding. The Problem: A Page That Exhausted Me It started with a course detail page. The page had to serve multiple countries, multiple user roles, all from a single codebase. The UI logic depended on 8 state dimensions: 4 user states (organization membership, employee status, certification, enrollment) and 4 course states (organization, pricing, subscription support, quote support). These 8 dimensions combined to determine what banner to show, how to display pricing, whether the CTA button was visible, clickable, or should trigger a tooltip or flyout — and in what priority order these checks should run. The logic itself wasn't the hard part. What exhausted me was this: the same business intent was being d