I first encountered them Friday evening after the pitch-session debacle. Here’s how Comedy Hack Day is supposed to work: After the pitches, developers, designers, and comedians spread out to form teams in a kind of cross between speed dating, course selection, and musical chairs. The whole event is like a mad chemistry experiment to see what sort of creative sparks might fly when you throw programmers together with comedians — “the two most awkward groups I know,” in the words of event impresario (and former Onion staffer) Craig Cannon.

Cannon and his colleagues — including another Onion alum, How To Be Black author Baratunde Thurston, and several other partners in an agency called Cultivated Wit — had provided small buttons for participants to wear to identify their skills. But hardly anyone wore the buttons. Instead, in a sort of social Brownian motion over the course of about an hour, participants milled and chatted and finally coalesced into small groups of three to six members gathered around folding tables. Surrounded by plastic beer cups, munchies, and laptops, they got down to work.

The Wearable Furby group skipped this whole process. They’d arrived together with their mission, first conceived by a skinny recent Stanford grad named Conor Doherty. (Not coincidentally, he’d been a winner in last year’s Comedy Hack Day in San Francisco as part of the team for “Citation Needed,” which lets you insert random BS into fake Wikipedia pages to win arguments.) As soon as the pitches concluded, they made a beeline for the glass-walled boardroom, spread out their tools on a conference table, and began the process of Furby dissection.

Responsibilities had already been divvied up: Joseph Victor would write the Python scripts that run the Furby’s (very) artificial intelligence, and also hook it up to @tiaraboom1, a Twitter bot he’d built. Neil Dahlke would create the Web front end for feeding lines to the Furby. Carl Sverre was going to build the backend system that tied together the user’s input with the scripts. (He also wore the Furby on his shoulder.) Hurshal Patel was the brave soul who would descend into the Furby’s innards with a soldering iron. Doherty, the team’s comic/geek double threat, would “bring the magic,” in Sverre’s words.

Hackathons have taken off over the past decade for any number of reasons. For tech workers, the allure of a what-the-hell attitude abetted by booze, burritos, and sleeping bags shouldn’t be underestimated. But the key selling point for hackathons is the short time-frame. In an industry where big projects routinely fall behind schedule and go on “death marches” to try to catch up, knowing that you only have a day or two to accomplish something can be an enormous relief. As Samuel Johnson said of the prospect of being hanged, it “concentrates the mind wonderfully.”