At hackathons, people never realised they could add context. They grew frustrated and left for Gemini or ChatGPT. I replaced Hydron’s empty prompt with a guided setup that ends at the first question.
Hydron is an AI assistant for engineers who build hardware and the software inside chips. Before it answers well it must read their sources, such as chip parts, files or code. That reading step is called indexing.
The empty prompt offered nothing to connect and nothing to ask, and analytics showed fewer than half of sign-ups creating a project.
The first run moves from sign-in through hardware and indexing to the first question.
Keeping every route in one list
One multi-select list holds pre-indexed hardware, files and a GitHub repository (an online code folder) or a zipped codebase. Hardware comes pre-checked because its 844 parts are ready in seconds with no indexing wait.
01
Log in
02
Attach hardware
Space adds a source and Enter commits. One registry part or file is the minimum.
03
Name the project
The name is inferred from the part and Enter accepts it.
04
Index
05
Ask the first question
I designed the flow with one engineer in three days and wrote the measurement requirements so the result could be read.
Leaving setup without losing it
Skip sits on its own s key outside the checklist, and an amber note explains what skipping costs. The hydron onboard command later resumes the setup instead of restarting it.
Making the change of screen the reward
Onboarding fills the screen with a centred layout and a large dot-matrix wordmark. The first prompt drops back to normal scrolling so the change itself tells people Hydron is ready.
Computing answers against your own hardware
Hydron computes each answer from the parts you attached instead of approximating from a similar chip. The AI is only as precise as the parts it has read, so setup leads with hardware.
Turning more sign-ups into projects
The flow shipped on 27 August 2026. Across two 30-day windows, project creation rose from 43.8% to 74%.
Grounding every answer from the first minute
An assistant that starts from an engineer’s own chips answers like a colleague who has read the manual. Every later Hydron feature can assume that grounding is already in place.