Challenge / 003

Automate Thyself

Use AI to automate part of your work or life — and show us how far you can push it.

Challenge Summary

This week, you’re not just working harder — you’re working smarter. Your mission is simple (but ambitious): pick one part of your job, your business, or your daily life, and figure out how much of it you can automate using AI tools. You might build a custom GPT. You might create a workflow of agents. You might duct tape five different apps together with a prayer and an API key. It’s all fair game.

The goal is to explore what’s possible — to prototype something that helps you reclaim time, energy, or focus. We’re not aiming for perfection. We’re aiming for leverage.

You’ll share:

  • What you chose to automate
  • What tools you used
  • A demo or walkthrough of your system
  • What worked, what broke, and what you learned along the way

Whether you end up with a sleek autonomous system or a glorious Frankenstein monster, we want to see it.

A robot

Inspiration

Here are some starting points:

You might create…

  • Build a custom GPT that answers common client questions
  • Set up an agent that triages your email inbox and flags important messages
  • Automate drafting weekly status reports based on your project management tool
  • Create a proposal-writing copilot for your freelance business
  • Use AI to handle parts of customer support (even if it’s just the first draft)
  • Set up a daily routine assistant that plans your day based on your calendar and priorities
  • Automate lead generation: find new clients, scrape data, and send intro emails
  • Build an agent that monitors news sites and summarizes relevant articles for you
  • Create a content repurposing machine: turn one article into tweets, LinkedIn posts, and newsletters
  • Train a small model on your writing style to answer FAQs in your voice

You can use anything you want to automate your work — custom GPTs with OpenAI, Projects in Claude, building bots with Lindy, or stitching together automations with Zapier AI, Make, or n8n. If you want to get fancy, you can explore tools like CrewAI, AutoGen, or Superagent for building agent workflows, or go deeper with LangChain, LlamaIndex, or Dust. You can even hack together solutions with Motion, Reclaim, Bardeen, or good old FastAPI + OpenAI if you’re feeling scrappy.

The goal isn’t to build something perfect — it’s to explore, experiment, and see how much you can get done with a little AI leverage.

A diagram of a workflow

Guidelines

This hackathon is intentionally loose — but a little structure helps. Here's what you need to know:

Schedule

The hackathon runs for one week, with optional live sessions along the way. Here's how it breaks down:

Kickoff Call

We'll start with a short kickoff call to walk through the challenge, share ideas, and get inspired.

Tuesday, 2025-04-15 at 13:00 CT
(14:00 ET / 11:00 PT)

Hackathon Begins

Start building. Share early ideas, sketches, and prototypes in Discord.

Tuesday, 2025-04-15 at 14:00 CT

Studio Hours

Optional live session for feedback and jamming on ideas.

Wednesday, 2025-04-16 at 11:00 CT
(12:00 ET / 09:00 PT)

Studio Hours

Optional live session for feedback and jamming on ideas.

Thursday, 2025-04-17 at 14:00 CT
(15:00 ET / 12:00 PT)

Submissions Due

Share a link to your project and a short write-up. A submission form will be shared near the end of the hackathon.

Sunday, 2025-04-20 at 14:00 CT
(15:00 ET / 12:00 PT)

Demo Day

We'll give everyone a chance to show off what they built and announce the final awards.

Monday, 2025-04-21 at 11:00 CT
(12:00 ET / 09:00 PT)

Studio Hours

Think of it like putting your project up on the wall: you'll get reactions, suggestions, and maybe even a new idea or direction you hadn't considered. You're welcome to come with something polished or totally in-progress.

This week's Studio Hours:

  • › Wednesday, 2025-04-16 at 11:00 CT
    (12:00 ET / 09:00 PT)
  • › Thursday, 2025-04-17 at 14:00 CT
    (15:00 ET / 12:00 PT)
Studio Hours illustration

Links will be shared in Discord before each session. You don't need to prepare anything formal — just bring what you've got and be ready to see what others are building too.

Prizes and Recognition

While this isn't a traditional competition, we still want to celebrate great work.

At the end of the week, we'll highlight a few standout projects during the Showcase. Recognition is based on creativity, execution, and that unnameable spark that makes something memorable. Think of these as community shoutouts.

We'll be recognizing projects these categories:

There may also be some surprise goodies — digital or otherwise.

Best of Luck

Look out for more updates in Discord.

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