The Big Hack Game · Stanford vs Berkeley · $10K

Stanford vs. Berkeley: The Big Hack Game before the Big Game. Win for your school!

Eligibility: Stanford and Berkeley students and alumni, as well as industry experts from enterprise AI teams (e.g., NVIDIA, Tesla, Google, Anthropic, OpenAI, Dell, Tiktok...) who can bring real-world problems to solve. We’ll match industry experts with student and alumni teams.

Please use your school or work email if available. Otherwise, a personal email is fine.

The Big Hack Game is a campus showdown: build, launch, and grow great AI products for good. Hackers own what they build.

HarnessRouter is a unified interface for agent harnesses that turns them into building blocks for your AI products. It helps you build production-ready AI features in hours and can reduce your product’s token costs by over 90% by helping you choose the best harness × model combination for each user task. Past hackathon participants have built products in hours and received their first check within a week.

With HarnessRouter, there’s no harness engineering, no deployment hassle, and no complex integration work across models, harnesses, and sandboxes.

💰 Prize pool: $5,000 guaranteed, with up to $10,000 in total cash prizes.

For every 100 attendees, we’ll add $1,000 to the prize pool, up to $10,000 in total cash prizes. Invite your friends to apply and help grow the prize pool!

Awards are allocated as percentages of the final prize pool:

• Grand Champion: 30% ($1,500–$3,000)

• Real Customer Award: 20% ($1,000–$2,000), plus introductions to relevant investors for teams showing strong potential

• Distribution & Impact: 20% ($1,000–$2,000)

• Best Build Log: 10% total ($500–$1,000 shared among the top five)

• School Cup: 20% ($1,000–$2,000 shared among the winning school’s winning teams and its school ambassador)

🌟 Extras for winners

• One-on-one YC application coaching, application review, and potential referrals, subject to mentor confirmation

Timeline (provisional)

• Team formation: Now through November 15, 2026

• Kickoff: November 14, 2026. You’ll receive further details once your application is approved.

• Demo Day: November 20, 2026. Location TBD; the event may be livestreamed globally.

Final dates, venue, eligibility requirements, judging criteria, and prize payment rules will be published before registration closes.

How to submit (via the portal)

• Submit either an open-source repository or a deployed product.

• Include a video of up to three minutes explaining the problem and demonstrating your product. Technical details are optional.

Rules snapshot

• Best Build Log and School Cup awards can be combined with the Grand Champion award.

• Real Customer Award: Only genuine payments from non-affiliated customers qualify. Paid or artificial engagement is not permitted.

• School Cup: A school must have at least 10 eligible teams to qualify.

• The Real Customer Award and School Cup may go unawarded if eligibility requirements are not met.

Organized by HarnessRouter Labs (YC-backed).

Additional sponsors may be announced, and the prize pool may increase.