42 Berlin : Building Autonomous Coding Agents - Hackathon Challenge

42 Berlin

Part of Mai ist für AI 2026 at 42 Berlin.

MAI IST FÜR AI

A dedicated month-long series exploring the impact, ethics, and innovations defining the age of Artificial Intelligence.

This isn't your usual hackathon. Over 24 hours, you won't just build software — you'll build the thing that builds the software.The challengeYou'll spend Thursday designing and building your team's autonomous coding agent: its orchestration, tool use, prompting, error recovery, the whole stack. At 8pm, we release a sealed engineering spec. Your agent's job is to read that spec and build the software it describes — overnight, autonomously, while you sleep (or panic, or both).By Friday 11am, you submit what your agent built, along with its logs and commit history. Friday afternoon: presentations, live evaluation, prizes.The constraint that makes it interestingNo paid API tokens. You'll work with free inference only — local models (Ollama, llama.cpp) or free-tier providers (Groq, Cerebras, Google AI Studio, and the like). The whole point is engineering your way around weaker models with smart agent design. This is genuinely what production AI looks like when you can't afford to burn money on every call.What to bring<ul><li>Your own laptop (we have a limited number of stations on campus, but can't guarantee one for everyone) plus your charger and any adapters. Your machine will be working hard.</li><li>External participants: campus closes at 9pm Thursday for non-42 folks, so plan to run your agent's overnight build from home. 42 students can stay on campus.</li><li>No team yet? No problem. Teams form on-site Thursday morning. Come solo or with people, both work.</li></ul>Worth thinking about before ThursdayYou don't need to arrive with anything built — Thursday is for setup and building. But teams that have thought about their stack in advance will move faster. Which model will you use: local (Ollama, llama.cpp) or free-tier remote (Groq, Cerebras, Google AI Studio)? Any agent framework you want to try (LangGraph, smolagents, or plain Python with a tool loop)?AgendaDay 1 — Thursday, May 21<ul><li>09:00 · Doors open, coffee, settle in</li><li>10:00 · Kickoff: welcome, the new challenge, full rules walkthrough</li><li>11:00 · Agent building begins</li><li>18:00 · Dinner + informal check-in with organizers</li><li>20:00 · Spec drops. Agents start running.</li><li>21:00 · Campus closes for external participants. Continue from home.</li></ul>Day 2 — Friday, May 22<ul><li>09:00 · Campus reopens</li><li>11:00 · Submissions close</li><li>11:00–13:00 · Evaluation window</li><li>13:00 · Presentations and live scoring</li><li>Late afternoon · Winners, prizes, networking</li></ul>JudgingWe're judging the agent, not just the artifact. Good engineering wins. We'll walk through scoring, prizes, and full rules at kickoff Thursday morning.See you Thursday at 9.

42 Berlin : Building Autonomous Coding Agents - Hackathon Challenge

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42 Berlin : Building Autonomous Coding Agents - Hackathon Challenge

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