Eligibility & Teams
  • Participants may compete solo or in teams of up to 3 people.
  • Each team may submit one project.
  • All team members must be identified in the final submission.
  • Participants of all experience levels are welcome.
Project Requirements
  • Projects must be created or meaningfully developed during the hackathon.
  • Each project must enter one of the four official tracks:
    1. Agentic Commerce
    2. Agentic Finance
    3. Agentic Marketing
    4. Agentic Engineering — Debug, Test & Ship
  • Projects must demonstrate meaningful agentic behavior, not simply a prompt-to-response chatbot.
  • The agentic functionality must be implemented and demonstrable.
Existing Projects & Open Source
  • Participants may use open-source projects, templates, frameworks, libraries, APIs, public datasets, and existing codebases they have permission to use.
  • You may clone an existing open-source project and make it agentic.
  • If starting from an existing project or template, you must disclose the original source and clearly show what you added or changed during the hackathon.
  • Participants are responsible for having the appropriate rights to all code, data, media, APIs, and other materials used.
Use of Mel
  • Mel must be materially used during the hackathon.
  • Mel may be used for planning, building, coding, research, running commands, debugging, testing, reviewing, fixing, iterating, and verification.
  • Teams must explain how Mel contributed to their project in the final submission.
Submission Requirements

Each submission must include:

  • Project name
  • Selected track
  • Team member names
  • Problem statement
  • Description of the solution
  • Explanation of what makes the project agentic
  • GitHub repository and/or working project URL
  • Short demo video showing the project working
  • 3 ways Mel helped your team
  • 3 issues, failures, or friction points experienced with Mel
  • 1 feature you would like to see added to Mel
Judging

Projects will be evaluated on:

  • 35% Usefulness — Does it solve a real problem?
  • 25% Execution — Does the core workflow actually work?
  • 20% Creativity — Is the approach innovative and thoughtful?
  • 20% Mel Use — Did Mel materially help build, debug, test, review, or ship the project?

Judges will evaluate what is actually demonstrated, not only what is described or planned.

Fair Play
  • Teams must accurately represent what they built during the hackathon.
  • Existing work must be disclosed.
  • Do not submit work you do not have permission to use.
  • Projects that misrepresent authorship, violate applicable rights, or do not meet the submission requirements may be disqualified.
  • The organizers and judges may request additional information or a demonstration to verify a submission.
Deadline

All projects must be submitted by the official submission deadline: Sunday at 2:00 PM ET.

Late or incomplete submissions may not be eligible for judging.

Build something real. Make it agentic. Test it. Verify it. Ship it. 🚀