The whole agreement, in one page.

Open to anyone. No coding experience is required.

Organisers, judges, and their immediate families may take part but cannot win a prize.

You must register before the event starts. Registration is subject to host approval, and we may decline a registration without giving a reason.

Solo, or a team of up to 5 people including you.

Everyone registers individually. You do not need a team to sign up, and you do not name one when you register — you can form a team on the day. The team is declared on the submission form, which is where you list every member.

One submission per team. You may not enter the same project in more than one team, and a person may only be on one team.

The work has to happen inside the three hours. That is the whole point of the format.

Allowed before the clock starts:

• Thinking about your idea, sketching it, writing notes.
• Installing Mel and your tools, and setting up accounts you will need.
• Open source libraries, frameworks, templates, APIs and public datasets that anyone else could also use.
• Design assets you already own the rights to, such as a logo or a font licence.

Not allowed:

• Application code written before the start, including a private head start on the same project.
• Submitting an existing product with three hours of changes on top.
• Work done by anyone not on your registered team, paid or otherwise.

Using an agent to do the work is the format, not a shortcut around it. Mel building your project during the event is exactly what we are asking for.

One submission per team, sent through the submission form before Aug 30, 2026, 2:00 PM EST.

The form closes at the deadline. Late entries are not judged, so submit early — you can email corrections until the deadline.

Every submission must include:

• A team or builder name, and a contact email we can reach you at.
• A link to the repository of what you built, set to public.
• Exactly one Mel session video, no longer than one minute. It shows the terminal, your instructions, and Mel carrying them out. A screen recording is fine and no editing is expected. A submission without it cannot be accepted. Host it on YouTube or Vimeo, set to public.
• One demo video, up to 5 minutes. Your idea, why it matters, and how it works. Slides, screen recordings and voiceover are all acceptable — you do not need to appear on camera. It must be uploaded to YouTube or Vimeo and made public.
• A description of what it does, in 300 characters or fewer.
• The consent below, ticked.

Anything illegal, hateful, or built to harm people is disqualified without discussion.

You keep ownership of what you build. Nothing here transfers your work to us. What you grant is permission to show it.

This is the exact text you agree to when you tick the consent box on the submission form:

I confirm this project was built during the hackathon and that I have the right to share everything I'm submitting. I grant Agentic Day, Mel, and their partners permission to use my submission — including the video, screenshots, project link, project name, and my name — in marketing, social media, websites, and event materials, without payment or time limit. I keep ownership of what I built.

In plain terms: we can post your project, your video, your screenshots and your name. We cannot sell your project or claim we built it. If you need something taken down later, email us and we will remove it from anything we control.

Five criteria, weighted evenly.

1. Usefulness — does it solve a real problem for a real person.
2. Creativity — an angle we have not seen before.
3. Clarity of execution — the idea is legible in ten seconds.
4. Production ready — it runs, and it survives a wrong input.
5. How well you put Mel to work — how much you handed over, and how far you pushed it.

A panel of founders, operators and engineers judges every entry. Judges are announced soon. They score independently and the scores are averaged. In a tie, the panel discusses and decides together. Their decision is final.

The winner takes $200 cash, Mel credits, and a feature across our channels.

Winners are emailed at the contact address on their submission within five working days of the deadline, and announced on our channels after that. You have 14 days to reply and confirm your details. If we do not hear back, the prize passes to the runner up.

Any tax is yours to handle.

Be decent to each other. Harassment, discrimination and abuse get you removed from the event and from future ones. Report anything to hello@openmel.dev and we will act on it.

We may change the schedule or these rules if we have to. Material changes are emailed to everyone registered.

The hackathon is presented by Mel. Your use of Mel is covered by its own terms at openmel.dev.