What if you had one day to build an AI agent that actually takes actions — and the best one could win an NVIDIA DGX Spark worth $5,000?
That’s the challenge behind the Agent Harness Hackathon, an in-person event happening in San Francisco on August 29, 2026.
This isn’t about building another chatbot. Participants have to create a working agent capable of using tools, running code safely, maintaining sessions and asking for human approval before sensitive actions.
There’s another useful perk: OpenAI is providing $50 in credits to every attendee, so participants can experiment without paying for the initial model usage themselves.
Agent Harness Hackathon at a Glance
| Feature | Information |
|---|---|
| Date & Time | August 29, 2026. 9:00 AM-6:00 PM PDT |
| Location | Bright Data, San Francisco |
| Format | In-person |
| Team Size | 1–4 members |
| Grand Prize | NVIDIA DGX Spark worth $5,000 |
| Bonus | $50 OpenAI credits per attendee |
The Goal: Build an Agent That Actually Does Something
A chatbot can tell you how to perform a task. Here, the expectation is higher.
Your agent should take action.
It could open a pull request, query a database, execute code, investigate an incident or delegate research to other agents.
Participants will build on an open-source agent harness introduced during the event’s morning workshops. The harness handles much of the infrastructure around the agent, including tool connections through MCP, sandboxed code execution, human approvals, subagents and persistent sessions.
It also supports different model providers, including OpenAI, Anthropic and Gemini.
The idea is simple: spend less time building agent infrastructure and more time making the agent itself useful.
There’s More Than One Way to Win
The headline prize is an NVIDIA DGX Spark Personal AI Supercomputer worth $5,000, awarded for the best use of the Agent Harness.
But that’s not the only prize.
The Best Code Quality winner receives a Mac Mini. This track requires teams to use Qodo to review their pull requests and address issues before merging.
There’s even a Keychron keyboard for the best blog post explaining what was built, how everything was connected and what went wrong along the way.
Each team can win only one track.
Before You Register, Check These Requirements
The Agent Harness Hackathon is in-person only at Bright Data in San Francisco.
Teams can have one to four members, and solo participants can find teammates at the event. Attendance is free, but participants need to bring a laptop, charger and ID.
Most importantly, the project repository must be open source.
For developers interested in AI agents, MCP, tool calling and agent infrastructure, this looks like much more than a standard one-day coding event. You get a day to build a working agent, $50 in OpenAI credits to experiment with, and a shot at hardware worth thousands of dollars.
