This is not a typical hackathon.

Most hackathons ask you to build something impressive in 24 hours and then forget about it. LEVIATHAN is different. It is the founding event of something larger — a community called AXI0M, built for students who have ideas worth taking seriously and the ambition to actually build them.

If that sounds like you, keep reading.

We optimised our systems for everything except the people inside them.

Social media, education, government, markets — these are systems that shape lives. They were designed for scale and efficiency. They were not designed with the human at their centre. The result is friction, invisibility, and quiet suffering that nobody questions because everybody assumes someone else already did.

This hackathon asks a simple question: what happens when you point AI at that problem?

Use AI to rebuild, optimise, or represent a human system at human resolution.

A human system is any structure where people are the moving parts.

Pick one. Study it. Then build something that does one of two things:

Optimise it — make it work better for the humans inside it. Not faster. Not cheaper. Better. Strip out friction that exists because nobody questioned it. Surface information that’s buried. Give people agency where the system currently removes it.

Represent it — make it legible. Build a simulation, a visualisation, a model that exposes how a human system actually operates — where it fails, where it helps, where it quietly punishes the people it was built to serve. Sometimes the most powerful tool isn’t a fix. It’s a mirror.

This is a chance to build something that actually matters. The technical challenge here is real — but the harder problem is understanding the system well enough to intervene usefully. You’ll be pushed beyond the comfortable territory of clean data and well-specified problems.

You belong here, and we mean that seriously. The hardest part of this hackathon is not writing code. It’s understanding the system — who it was built for, who it fails, and why nobody fixed it. That is exactly what your degree trains you to do.

The tools available, including Lovable (our sponsor), are built so that anyone can ship a working product without prior coding experience. You can arrive with an idea and leave with something real. We actively want people who understand power, institutions, and people — because without that, technically impressive projects just automate the wrong thing faster.

If you’ve never written a line of code, that is not a barrier. Come with a problem worth solving.

We believe the value of attending university is, in large part, access — access to people, to ideas, to the energy of other ambitious minds. And yet almost nowhere on campus is there a space genuinely designed for students to develop their ideas seriously. The societies committee is not that. The pub is not that.

AXI0M is being built to be that space.

A physical place. A collaborative community. An AI-powered environment where your ideas can move from first instinct to real thing, with the people and tools to get them there. We are looking for the founding members — the people who will shape what this becomes.

LEVIATHAN is how we find them.

The people who show up, think hard about a real problem, and build something in 24 hours — those are the people we want to build AXI0M with. The top builders will be invited to join as founding members.

We are not just interested in what you build. We are interested in how you build it.

AI must be embedded in your process — not as decoration, but as a genuine part of how you think, prototype, and ship. Your submission must include a written AI workflow method: what tools you used, at what stage, how they shaped your decisions, and where they fell short.

We care about this because the hackathon’s thesis applies to your own process too. You are a human inside a system — the system of building. Show us you thought about that.

• Optimisation/Representation of a human system
  
• Use of AI in a novel or efficient manner