Brain 2026

This hackathon was in February 2026, in collaboration with the consulting company Bouvet. The case was wide open and creative: how could AI be used in politics. Every group invented their own party and attacked the case completely differently, from serious plans for how AI could actually be implemented in politics to fully vibed party platforms. People even started building bots in the hackathon Slack that posted propaganda for their own "party", which was funny but also a little unsettling given how close it felt to reality.

Language models were accelerating fast at this point, and we realized a normal hackathon workflow of branches and merging PRs would take longer than just having a model write the code for you. So instead of one shared codebase we split into several sub-projects linked under a single webpage, built to show how an AI driven political party could function.

I worked on the agent system: a president agent with several "minister" subagents, each only allowed to reason about their own field, like the economy minister only judging whether a proposed law was good or bad for the economy. Since models tend to be sycophantic and just agree with you, especially at the time, each minister was actually split into three: one that only argued the negatives, one that only argued the positives, and one that cast the final vote based on both. The vote and its reasoning were sent up to the president agent, who made the final call. The agents also had tools available, like a RAG database and web search. I built a futuristic UI around this showing the president communicating with its ministers, all running on Cerebras inference at around 1000 tokens per second, which I was experimenting with at the time.

The rest of the team worked on auto generated propaganda posters, which fed on the posts from the other teams' bots, an AI generated party video, and a real time avatar of the president you could talk to, which had access to a previously generated party plan through RAG. We won the hackathon. I slept 30 minutes over the two days, and almost fell asleep at the closing dinner.