Sep. 2026
Sticker: phones pharmacies for a prescription's cash price and prices it against the federal benchmark. Sixteen real calls, zero prices, and the measured reason why
Submission for the CALL-E phone-call agents hackathon (Sep 2026). Pharmacies nationally paid about 43 cents for thirty metformin tablets. That is the national average acquisition cost the federal government publishes every week, surveyed from pharmacy invoices. What you pay is a different number: different at every counter, changing, published nowhere. Pharmacy contracts with benefit managers commonly require the pharmacy to hand the PBM its lowest price, so posted cash prices sit above negotiated rates instead of competing. Around 19,000 independent pharmacies sit largely outside the comparison sites. The only reliable way to learn a cash price is to telephone the counter, and that is the established research method: a 2020 study phoned 265 pharmacies and found one generic ranging from $29.99 to $1,345.00 inside a single metro area. Those studies took teams weeks. That is the thing a phone agent should do in an afternoon.
CALL-E phone-call agent API (REST transport, overlapping calls on one event loop)Recipient result schema (a price is a validated field, every uncertain field can answer unknown)CMS NADAC weekly acquisition-cost benchmark (public, keyless)NPPES NPI Registry, filtered to the walk-in retail pharmacy taxonomy+5
Sep. 2026
Day Thirty: your insurance appeal, argued from 22,090 decisions California's own physicians published, ready to sign before the day-thirty clock runs out
Submission for the AWS Agents for Humans hackathon, Everyday Agents track (Sep 2026). Last year insurers denied about 85 million in-network claims on HealthCare.gov. Consumers appealed 262,982 of them, under one percent, and insurers upheld 66 percent of the appeals they received (KFF, 2024). When the same kind of denial reaches an independent physician through California's Independent Medical Review, 72.3 percent were overturned in 2025. An insurer reviewing its own denial upholds it two times in three. An independent doctor overturns it nearly three times in four. The entire gap is people not filing.
Claude Haiku 4.5 on Amazon Bedrock (drafts the appeal)Amazon Nova Lite on Bedrock (reads the denial letter)Strands Agents SDK (three tools + a human interrupt at the gate)Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Runtime (ARM64 container via CodeBuild + ECR)+6
Sep. 2026
Northbound: your Canadian truck already drove that lane empty, this finds the freight it could legally have carried
Submission for the RoadStar Hackathon 2026, built on Roadstar Trucking's own dispatch data. Every Canadian cross-border carrier lives under two rulebooks, and its trucks spend weeks at a time inside a country whose freight they are mostly not allowed to haul. I started with a hypothesis (Ontario carriers haul into the US Midwest loaded and come home empty) and their own records said it was wrong: across 10,479 completed legs and 1,596,093 miles, coming home empty happened six times. The empty running is inside the United States, between loads, and whether any of it could have carried freight turns out to be a legal question, not a routing one.
TypeScript + Node.jsGLM 5.2 on SPUR Compute (freight-offer parsing)Deterministic TypeScript legality engine (model never asserts the statute)19 CFR 123.14(c)(1), 49 CFR 395.3, SOR/2005-313 (cited to primary sources in LEGAL.md)+5
Sep. 2026
Dailies: smart glasses walk off a film set with the continuity paperwork already written
Submission for the Agentic Cinema hackathon, ClickHouse track (Sep 2026). A script supervisor stands just off set with a clipboard and, between every take, writes down where the mug sat, whether the jacket was buttoned, which hand held the phone. It is the last job on a film shoot still done entirely on paper, and the failure mode is quiet: when a line gets missed nobody finds out until the edit. By then it is not an edit problem, it is a pickup day. A 2026 survey of forty US production markets prices a fixed six-person, ten-hour shoot day at $1,440 in the cheapest market (Santa Fe) and $3,020 in the most expensive (Boston). Dailies watches a take for 1.6 cents, priced at Google's published Gemini rates on real footage. A whole forty-take day costs about 63 cents, or 0.04% of the day it is guarding. Neither number is mine: Google meters the tokens and sets the price, and the industry sets the day rate. What is deliberately not claimed anywhere is a count of reshoots prevented, because that would be my own code marking its own homework.
Ray-Ban Meta Gen 2 (Meta Wearables Device Access Toolkit)Kotlin + Jetpack Compose (Android capture app)FastAPI on Google Cloud Run (us-east1)Gemini 3.6 Flash (extraction, reconciliation, question agent)+7
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
