Four teams. One product. Eight hours.

A hacker makes a thing work by Friday that everybody said would take a year. A city has always had the ideas. It has been short of you. The idea the city voted to the top lands in front of the teams at ten in the morning. You build AI-native, with the models on your side of the table. By the bell it is a working app with users in the room, and on Monday it keeps building itself.

Four teams build one super app together, and they compete to collaborate. How the work splits is set per episode: a team might own one layer of the product end to end, or every team might be fully capable and take a slice of the whole. Either way every part has to fit, every team is scored on what the others build on, and the room scores the finished app.

You build into a frame that exists. Auth, deployment, CI, the contracts between the parts, the Composite repo with its merge process running: all of it ships before the night. That is why a day is enough.

The room is your user base all day. The app is open on every phone from the first session, and feedback comes off the floor to you while you are still building. Ship against it before the bell.

Then the room scores the finished app one to ten, and every team's score is multiplied by it. Hoard and you lose. Only help and you land mid table. Win by being the team everyone else built on. If the app misses the bar, every payout scales down with it.

1. 01

   A share of the pot

   A floor for every team, the rest by Standing, the room's score scaling it all.

2. 02

   Your name on the app, permanently

   In the credits, the repository and the public dashboard, for as long as it runs.

3. 03

   The app keeps itself going

   By the end of the hackathon an autonomous framework picks up the backlog, watches production, fixes what breaks, and the organization the city chose runs it. Moving on is a handover to a product that develops itself.

4. 04

   A documented share if it is ever commercialized

   Papered by counsel before anyone signs. Nothing on the night is an offering.

5. 05

   The code is a commons

   Permissive license from the first commit. Run it, fork it, sell what you build on it.

Builders who ship, and who make other people faster. Twenty four seats, four teams. Austin already has rooms where these people gather every month, and those rooms are where we are looking first. If you build with one of these, you are already who we are looking for.

• AITX Community

  Antler VC · 800 Brazos

  Seven hackathons, 828 builders, the most active hackathon operator in the city. If you have shipped at one of theirs, you know the clock.

• Austin AI Hub

  501(c)(3)

  A nonprofit building AI for good, five hundred members, and a global hackathon already behind them. The closest thing to this night's thesis in one organization.

• Open Austin

  Civic technology

  The community that carries the Hack for Change lineage. You have built for this city before, and this is that work with a room and a show around it.

• Freetail Hackers · HackTX

  UT Austin

  If you have built through a HackTX weekend, eight hours with a team beside you is a different kind of fun.

• AI Tinkerers · Bitcoin Park

  Austin

  Rooms that gather to build. Bring what you were tinkering with; one of the four teams probably needs it.

• Good Systems · ACC · DivInc

  The pipeline

  The people learning to build, and the programs that make sure the room looks like the city. The four teams should too.

• The developer meetups

  Women Who Code · Austin Python · the AI groups

  Where the twenty four actually come from. Tell your meetup.

• Designers and product people

  Every team needs one

  A super app is touched before it is understood. If you design, write, or run product, one of the four teams is short of exactly you.

We look at temperament as closely as skill, because this cohort sets the tone for everything after. Apply: your name, what you build, what you are strongest at, one thing you shipped, one thing you helped somebody else ship.