​Agent Harness Hackathon

​Organized by TrueFoundry and HackerSquad. Sponsored by OpenAI.

​AI agents are easy to prototype and much harder to run in production. Once an agent touches real users, tools, data, budgets, and internal systems, the work expands into routing, permissions, tracing, retries, evals, guardrails, cost controls, and deployment.

​Join TrueFoundry and HackerSquad for a full-day hackathon focused on building production-minded agentic applications with TrueForge, with sponsorship from OpenAI.

​Take an agent use case from idea or prototype toward something you can observe, govern, evaluate, and operate. TrueFoundry’s AI Gateway, Agent Gateway, and MCP Gateway will frame the day, with practical work on model routing, controlled tool access, MCP workflows, observability, eval loops, fallback behavior, budget controls, and deployment.

​Bring a laptop, a concrete use case, and a willingness to build under realistic production constraints.

​What You Can Build

• ​An agent workflow with model routing, retries, and fallback behavior

• ​A tool-using agent with controlled MCP or API access

• ​An observability layer for traces, tool calls, latency, usage, cost, and failures

• ​An eval or test harness for agent behavior across repeated runs

• ​A governance pattern for permissions, approvals, logging, blocking, or escalation

• ​An agent application that demonstrates how it could run inside a real team or platform environment

​The Challenges We’ll Explore

• ​Coordination: Connecting models, tools, permissions, memory, and context into reliable workflows

• ​Visibility: Understanding what an agent did, why it did it, and what changed between runs

• ​Reliability and cost: Managing quotas, budgets, latency, provider failures, retries, and fallbacks

• ​Runtime controls: Defining what data agents can access, which tools they can call, and when human approval is required

• ​Deployment: Connecting agents to internal systems while maintaining governance and reliability as usage grows

​Who Should Apply

• ​Platform, infrastructure, and backend engineers building or operating AI agent systems

• ​AI and product engineers working with LLMs, tool calling, MCP, evals, or agent workflows

• ​Technical founders moving agent prototypes toward production

• ​Security, DevOps, and ML platform practitioners working on governance, observability, and cost control

• ​Builders with a concrete agent use case and enough technical experience to build during the day

​Format

• ​Check-in, coffee, and setup

• ​Welcome from HackerSquad and TrueFoundry

• ​TrueFoundry Agent Harness introduction

• ​Challenge brief, build tracks, and judging rubric

• ​Focused build time with technical support available

• ​Project submissions and supporting evidence

• ​Selected demos, judging, awards, and closing remarks

• ​Networking and follow-up conversations

​Bring

• ​Your laptop

• ​An agent use case, workflow, prototype, or infrastructure problem to work on

• ​Questions about model gateways, MCP tools, observability, evals, cost controls, deployment, or agent governance

• ​Any teammates you plan to build with

​Event Details

​When: Saturday, September 19, 2026 · 9:30 AM–8:00 PM PT
Where: 3120 Scott Blvd, Santa Clara, CA 95054
Admission: Free, with approval required. Space is limited, and applications will prioritize technical builders working on relevant agent infrastructure and application problems.

Prizes for top demos
1st - $2,000
2nd - $1,000
3rd - $500

​Thank you to OpenAI for sponsoring the hackathon and to AI Global Campus for hosting us.