Internal Hackathon

$1,000 On The Line

The brief was one line long, build something that helps other Lyra engineers, and it came with $1,000 for the winner, teams of 1 to 3, and a weekend to pull it off. The spec got dropped in the office so people could start teaming up and throwing ideas around, and the channel picked up 71 people before the afternoon was out.

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Judging came down to four things, impact, originality, technical execution and presentation, with a 4 minute demo video as the submission, so a good idea only got you halfway and the pitch had to carry the rest.

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Midnight Lobby

With submissions closing on Sunday night we had people asking if the repo needed to be shared, admitting they'd submitted with about a minute to spare, and trying to work out who else had entered with one team building an inference layer for the whole company, a single place to route AI requests without everyone setting up their own keys. Another went after the knowledge problem, a shared memory where a fix one person figured out can be captured once and found later from the terminal, the web or Claude Code. Someone took the "helps engineers" part of the brief in a more literal direction and built a gamified sleep tracker, since we all know how the week before a deadline goes, and it pays out coins for good sleep, has a pixel art room to decorate, and lets friends pool their coins into a shared house that starts as a wooden shack and works its way up to a mansion. Sleep data stays private unless you choose to share it, which was the first question anyone asked, and a few of us got added as testers by hand while the app store review caught up.

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Winners

LyraLink, built by Aarnav and Dylan, took the $1,000.

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Many of our engineers work with AI coding agents like Claude Code and Codex. LyraLink captures what those agents learn during each session and shares it across the team and across our client projects, so a problem one engineer has already solved is available to the next engineer who runs into it. The agents can also talk to each other, so one engineer’s agent can pass what it knows to another’s without either person stopping their work. On top of that, engineers can share compute into a common inference system, which means the team runs its agents on a shared pool instead of each person covering their own setup. You can see it at lyralink.dev, and the demo video is here.

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What the weekend showed

A hackathon with almost no rules gets you a wide mix of ideas, and everyone had a different view of what slows an engineer down. The winning idea was about the problem newer engineers mention most, not knowing who to ask. People also spent the night after the deadline testing each other’s builds and teasing each other in the same message, which is a good sign for a team that spends most of its week in separate cities.

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Congrats to Aarnav and Dylan, and thanks to everyone who submitted. Keep an eye out for the next Engfest.

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