CodeSynth 2.0👩🏽‍💻: Rebuilding My Hackathon Prototype into a CRDT-Powered Coding Playground🚀

What I Built CodeSynth started as a hackathon experiment. At the time, I wanted to build something that genuinely used real-time systems instead of making yet another chat app. While exploring WebSockets, I came across collaborative coding environments and thought: “What if I could build my own mini multiplayer IDE?” As a second-year university student, that sounded both exciting and slightly terrifying — which made it the perfect hackathon project. And that’s how CodeSynth was born. The original version was heavily inspired by platforms like CodePen. Users could join shared rooms and code together in real time using Socket.io. I also experimented with AI-powered tooling using Cohere, Botpress, and GPT-3.5 for documentation generation and chatbot support. It worked surprisingly well for a hackathon build. But under the hood, the collaboration system was fragile. Concurrent edits could overwrite each other, scaling the editor was difficult, and the architect