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 build window. 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 a weekend of changes on top.
• Work done by anyone not on your registered team, paid or otherwise.
• Building with another AI coding agent or assistant. Mel is the tool for this event — you confirm on the submission form that you built with Mel only.

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. Ordinary libraries, frameworks and APIs are still fine — the restriction is on swapping Mel for another agent.

One submission per team, sent through the submission form before Saturday, September 19 at 8:30 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.
• A recording of the Mel sessions you used to build the project. It should cover the build from the first idea through to the last change — 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 agree to the event rules and to being contacted about the Miami AI Hackathon, Agentic Day and future events.

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.

Projects are evaluated on all of the following.

1. Importance of the problem — Does it solve something that actually matters?
2. Agentic workflow and tool use — Are agents and tools doing real work, not just chatting?
3. Quality of execution — Is the product functional, polished and coherent?
4. Verification and responsible human oversight — Can a person check, steer and trust the result?
5. Creativity and originality — Is the approach fresh and unexpected?
6. Real-world usefulness — Would someone use this tomorrow?
7. Quality of the live demonstration — Does the demo prove the idea in real time?

Every entry is judged by our panel — — with more names announced closer to the event. They score independently and the scores are averaged. In a tie, the panel discusses and decides together. Their decision is final.

Up to $12910 in winner awards. The Overall Grand Prize is up to $2,485 and includes $1,000 cash from Mel; Best Use of ElevenLabs is up to $4,485; and the five SSOJet Enterprise-Ready Awards are worth $1,188 each. Every participant receives complimentary Mel build credits and one month of ElevenLabs Creator, including 131,000 credits. Prize values assume the maximum team size where applicable, and are subject to attendance, project submission, event rules and sponsor terms.

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 pr@helloagentic.ai 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.