Mentoring Code for Climate NYC

Getting back to my roots after some free food for millionaires events (¯\_(ツ)_/¯)

Two projects from this weekend’s Code for Climate hackathon are still on my mind.

TerraWatch started with a question that sounds simple but isn’t: what does it actually cost, in energy and money, to send a prompt? The team of New York area high school and college students spent the day going deep on that problem. By the time they presented, they had a live widget tracking the environmental footprint of queries on Base44 (the vibe coding website acquired by Wix) and a prompt optimization tool that compresses and restructures inputs to cut token usage across Claude, Gemini, and others. Not mockups. Shipped product.

TerraWatch took home Most Innovative Project.

GreenGrid came at the climate problem from a different angle. Two women with graduate degrees (Carnegie Mellon, were thinking about the people who decide where data centers get built and what energy contracts they sign. Those decisions have enormous downstream consequences and almost no good tooling. They built a platform that scores U.S. sites for sustainability before construction, analyzes PPA contracts for risk, and matches operators with real regional renewable energy data. Again, live by end of day.

GreenGrid took home Most Impactful Project.

I had the chance to work with both teams during the day, talking through architecture, tradeoffs, and how to sharpen what they were building. Watching them move from early ideas to working, presentable products in a single day was genuinely impressive.

Both projects were built at NYTechWeek’s Code for Climate: Build with AI, hosted by Base44, Givebutter, and Mentor Me Collective.

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