Sep. 2026
Elbow Room: before you buy the couch, find out whether it can get up the stairs
Submission for the WebMCP hackathon (Sep 2026). Every room planner ever built answers does it fit in the room. Elbow Room answers the question that costs people money and plaster: can it even get there. The problem is personal. A couch got stuck on my basement stairs and took some of the wall with it. Months later, installers brought a 279 litre water heater down the same stairs and gouged the soffit. Two objects, one staircase, nobody measured it either time, and there was nowhere to look it up. The property listing gives all thirteen rooms to the inch and says nothing about the stairs.
WebMCP (document.modelContext)HTML Canvas 2D + custom 3D orbit viewSingle-image metric rectification (homography)Numerical corner-solver (ladder-around-a-corner with width)+5
Aug. 2026
Nightshift: agentic prior-art search that reads 2,000 patents in 4 minutes for $34
Submission for the All Things Agentic Hackathon, track: The Taskmaster (Aug 2026). Non-practicing entities filed 55.4% of US patent cases in 2025, drove 90.3% of high-tech patent litigation, and added 2,236 defendants that year (Unified Patents). AIPLA puts the median defense cost of a suit with less than $1M at risk at $600,000. The first real question in any of them is whether the asserted patent was already invented by someone else, and answering that properly means a professional prior-art search that is itself priced out of reach of exactly the companies most often targeted. Nightshift asks that question autonomously, in the background, for $34.57 a run.
Google Cloud Run Jobs (fan-out)BigQuery (171,695-patent corpus, materialized + clustered)Vertex AI Gemini 3.5 Flash (judgment stage)gemini-embedding-001 at 768 dims (prefilter)+5
Aug. 2026
sentry-python DedupeIntegration Retained 1024 KB per Live Asyncio Task Because Python Cannot Weakref a ValueError. Root-Caused, Fixed with a Weak-Referenceable Identity Token, Repro'd, Measured, and Prepared as an Upstream PR to Fix Issue #6094.
Submission for DEV's Summer Bug Smash: Clear the Lineup, powered by Sentry (Aug 2026). sentry-python is Sentry's Python SDK. Its DedupeIntegration stops the same error being reported twice by remembering the last exception. Remembering an exception is exactly what you must not do: an exception holds its traceback, a traceback holds its frames, and a frame holds every local. The SDK knew this and stored a `weakref.ref(exc)` for the reason. The three lines directly under the comment `# we can only weakref non builtin types` do the one thing the weakref existed to prevent: a bare `except TypeError:` catches Python's refusal to weakref a builtin and quietly holds the exception itself. `ValueError`, `KeyError`, `TypeError`, the ones almost every real error actually is.
Python 3.11+sentry-sdk 2.68.0asyncioContextVar+5
Aug. 2026
Still Here: 510 Dogs Have an Intake Record at Austin's Shelter and No Outcome Record. Black Dog Syndrome Does Not Appear in 99,916 Stays. The Color That Waits Is Whichever Breed the Coat Belongs To.
Submission for the DEV Weekend Challenge: Dog Days Edition (Aug 2026). Still Here is a live board of every dog Austin Animal Center has an intake record for and no outcome record, 510 of them at last pull, ordered by how long they have waited. The one at the top is Pancho, a white Cairn Terrier picked up as a stray on May 23, 2025, who has been there 449 days. 99.7% of the dogs in his breed group were adopted in less time than he has already been waiting. Austin publishes that number in its open data feed and prints it nowhere near the adoption page; the site is the join.
SnowflakeAustin Animal Center open data (Socrata)ElevenLabsAdopets embed join+5
Aug. 2026
Assay: A Skincare Tracker with an Error Bar. Cropping the Same Photo Moves the Texture Score by 5.81 Points, So a Verdict Only Fires When the Change Beats That Floor on Your Face.
Submission for the YouCam API Skin AI & Apparel VTO Hackathon (Aug 2026). Assay is a skincare tracker that measures its own error before it measures your skin. Change is only called real when it exceeds the noise floor for your face, on your device. When it does not, the verdict is 'cannot tell yet' with the number of further sessions required, instead of an encouraging fabrication. The YouCam Skin Analysis API is a genuinely good instrument (byte-identical input gives byte-identical output, verified in the app), and Assay is what makes its readings decision-grade.
Next.js 16 (App Router, static export)React 19TypeScriptYouCam Skin Analysis API (Perfect Corp)+5
Aug. 2026
Unsay: An AI Medication-Safety Agent that Goes Back and Un-Says What It Told You. When the FDA Escalates a Recall, It Corrects Every Named Patient It Already Reassured, in Seconds.
Submission for the Build the Future of AI Agent Memory with CockroachDB hackathon (Aug 2026). Unsay is an AI medication-safety agent whose memory has two independent time axes: `valid_from`/`valid_to` for when a claim is true in the world, `asserted_at`/`retracted_at` for when this system believed it. Keeping those apart is what separates 'the drug became dangerous in March' from 'we found out in July', which is the difference between an unlucky answer and a negligent one. A claim is never updated in place: the believed version is retracted and a new one asserted beside it, in one transaction. Every answer records exactly which claim VERSION it read, in the same transaction as the answer itself.
CockroachDB Cloud (bitemporal schema, VECTOR(1024), REGIONAL BY ROW, SURVIVE REGION FAILURE)Distributed Vector Indexing (`believed`-prefixed on `fact`)CockroachDB Managed MCP Server (`get_table_schema` against the running cluster)cockroachdb-skills (all 34 skills; `designing-application-transactions` found real defects)+6
Jul.-Aug. 2026
Bloom: Nobody Cancels, They Just Stop Coming. Bloom Reads Each Client's Own Visit Rhythm, Flags the Ones Drifting from It, and Writes a Personal Note to Each. Rules Decide Who, Gemini Decides What to Say.
Submission for the Google Gemini XPRIZE / Hacker.fund Build with Gemini hackathon (Jul-Aug 2026, closes Aug 17). Bloom finds the clients a local business is about to lose, and writes to each one personally. A typical salon loses about 40% of its clients every year, a first-timer who does not rebook within 30 days has roughly a one-in-five chance of ever returning, and a loyal regular is worth several hundred dollars a year (about $600 annualized). The signal is invisible because it is an absence, spread across hundreds of people who each have their own rhythm.
Next.js 16 (App Router) + React 19Google Gemini 2.5 Flash via Vertex AI (win-back drafting, weekly content, self-QA gate)TypeScriptPrisma 7 on Neon Postgres+6
Aug. 2026
coldpath: The Arm AI Ecosystem Ships with the Matrix Unit Off. I Wrote the Tool that Finds It, Filed the One-Line Fix Upstream (Ollama PR #17654), and Gated It in CI.
Submission for the Arm Cloud AI challenge on Devpost. coldpath is a linter and CI gate that proves whether a shipped AArch64 binary actually uses the chip's matrix hardware. Pointed at the ecosystem, it found that Ollama's official Windows-on-Arm build executes zero matrix and zero dot-product instructions, filed the one-line upstream fix (PR #17654) worth 5.75x on prompt processing measured live on Azure Cobalt 100 (Neoverse N2), and ships as a reusable GitHub Action so a cold build can't reach an Arm fleet again.
Python 3.11+Capstone (AArch64 disassembler)pyelftools + pefile + macholib (ELF, PE, Mach-O)GitHub Actions (ubuntu-24.04-arm, free Neoverse N2 runner)+8
Aug. 2026
Culprit: A Stack Trace for Model Decay. Named the Column, Priced the Damage at $90,322/mo Across 66,146 Real NYC Taxi Trips, and Opened the PR.
Submission for Build with DataHub: The Agent Hackathon (Production ML Agents track). Freshness, volume, null-rate, and schema checks were all green. The model had been quietly wrong for six months. Culprit walked DataHub's ML lineage back to the column that did it, filed the incident into the graph with the dollars attached, wrote the fix, executed dbt build against the real warehouse to verify the fix held up, and only then opened the PR.
DataHub OSS v1.5 (metadata graph, ML entities, incidents)mcp-server-datahub (agent reads through DataHub's own MCP server)DataHub Python SDK (ML lineage emission: mlFeature/mlModel/dataProcessInstance)OpenAI GPT-4o (provider-agnostic; Anthropic + local Ollama also supported)+5
