Developer's 72-Hour Hackathon Build Revealed Security Flaws After Submission

A developer built and submitted a web application called Charitas Clew during a 72-hour DEV Weekend Challenge, then continued auditing it post-submission. Working alongside two AI systems — Antigravity using Gemini and a custom ChatGPT assistant called Dr. Kahlo — the developer identified several security weaknesses, including a flawed prompt-injection keyword blacklist that was replaced with stronger structural controls. Live testing of the deployed application uncovered a misconfigured proxy trust setting that caused the IP-based rate limiter to malfunction in production, a flaw that automated tests had failed to catch. By the end of the audit, the project had grown to 143 passing tests, yet production still surfaced unexpected behavior. The key takeaway was that automated tests only validate the model of the system you built, not the real-world environment it runs in.
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