The Big Hack Game · Stanford vs Berkeley · $10K
Stanford vs. Berkeley: The Big Hack Game before the Big Game. Win for your school!
💰 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
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.
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.
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.