[13]hackathon

★ Top 15 · Microsoft, Noida

Automate India Hackathon 2026

🎯 Finalist

What if AI agents had to get real jobs? We built KIBBUTZ, an autonomous AI company: give it a goal and it hires AI employees, delegates, builds and ships, all inside a live pixel-art office. The catch was the ArmorIQ track's real question: who authorised that action? 67 teams entered the track, 15 were invited to the final at the Microsoft office in Noida, and we were one of them.

When
August 2026
Where
Microsoft Office, Noida
Hosted by
HackBriven · ArmorIQ track
Format
in person · 3 days
Track
ArmorIQ track · Secure AI agents
EVOLVE AI at Automate India Hackathon 2026

[01]The squad

EVOLVE AI

  • Govind Jindal← that's me
  • Kaushal Jindal
  • Aaradhya Khanna
  • Piyush Sharma

My role · Pixel-office frontend & workforce orchestration

[02]The road to the finale

  1. Round 1

    The online round

    The pitch deck, all pixel art: an AI company where agents hire, delegate and collaborate like real employees, but no agent ever gets authority it wasn't given.

    Top 15 of 67 ✓

  2. Round 2

    The build

    Three days of building, breaking it, fixing it and breaking it again: agent runtime, hiring engine, task pipelines, the pixel office and the security gate.

    Shipped (mostly) 😭

  3. Round 3

    The final

    29 August, at the Microsoft office in Noida. One big hall full of laptops, and a demo that somehow came together.

    🎯 Finalist

[03]What we built

KIBBUTZ

KIBBUTZ home page

Running live, right here. Click around.

  • A live pixel-art office

    Every agent is a pixel character at a desk. WebSockets push its status (working, idle, done) so you watch the company work in real time.

  • Hire, authorise, execute

    Agents never just "get a task". KIBBUTZ picks the role, hires the right employee from a roster of 44 across nine departments, scopes its access, then lets it work.

  • Role-bound authority

    Every hire comes with a role contract: the tools, data and actions it's allowed. Stepping outside the job description is impossible.

  • The ArmorIQ gate

    Every intent is verified and logged before it runs. A CMO trying to call the payment tool gets "Authorization denied", traced back to the human who never delegated it.

  • A workforce that reshapes itself

    More load means more hires. Agents collaborate, go idle, take a chai break, and get released when the job's done.

  • Real deliverables

    The agents ship actual artefacts: generated websites, PPTX decks and images, on Groq and Gemini with failover between API keys.

React + ViteFastAPIMongoDBRabbitMQWebSocketsGroqGeminiArmorIQ SDK

Live deckGitHubThe full story, by Kaushal

[04]Side quests

  • Idle agents doom-scroll

    One of the first commits: "idel reels time reel scrolling and stuff". When an agent had no task, it scrolled reels. Later on, they got chai breaks too. ☕

    Chai break

  • Visitor 065, escort required

    Three days of chaos ended inside the Microsoft office in Noida, on a visitor lanyard.

    Visitor 065

  • The essentials

    HackBriven kept us alive on the two most important hackathon resources: pizza and Pepsi. 🥤

    Fuelled ✓

  • TIL, blockchains

    Insights from Raajeev Anand Sir taught us there are far more types of blockchain than we thought. 😭

    TIL

  • Rate-limited, live

    On final day, the log fills with "dual API key rotation", "Gemini fallback models" and "lower quota usage". Even AI employees hit their limits.

    HTTP 429

[05]Plot twist

We built a company of AI. HR became the hardest department. 🧑‍💼

Slide 2: "Who authorized this action?"
Slide 2: "Who authorized this action?"

Then 😱

The idea sounded simple: a startup where every worker is an AI. Need a researcher? Hire one on the spot. Job done? Let them go. Agents would do the work, and we'd watch. 🍿

Now 🧠

Giving an AI a job title is easy. Giving it authority safely is the real problem. A marketing agent must never reach the payout tool, even if the CEO agent hands it the task. So every action has to be checked against a chain of authority before it runs, not logged after the damage. 🔐

[06]The night before Noida 🌙

Commits
14
Span
3h 34m
Avg. message
53.4 chars
Shortest
“error fix”

Final day began at midnight. Between 00:43 and 01:19 I pushed eight commits in 36 minutes, building the HR workforce command center and wiring it into the office, then the realtime WebSocket push landed at 3:56 AM. The repo hit 174 commits across four of us, and the ArmorIQ dashboard went in at 2 PM, on the day itself.

[07]From the floor

Sovereign, Noida. The Microsoft office.
Sovereign, Noida. The Microsoft office.
"Select your employee": 44 AI employees, 9 departments
"Select your employee": 44 AI employees, 9 departments
67 teams → 15. EVOLVE AI, second list. 🧵
67 teams → 15. EVOLVE AI, second list. 🧵
Cute pixel office on top, cryptographic governance underneath
Cute pixel office on top, cryptographic governance underneath
The final hall
The final hall
"Kibbutz doesn't just make agents work together. It makes them work together responsibly."
"Kibbutz doesn't just make agents work together. It makes them work together responsibly."

[08]The certificate

Certificate for Automate India Hackathon 2026Delivered ✓

Certificate found. 📬

A Certificate of Recognition from HackBriven, 29 August 2026, Microsoft Office Noida, photographed on the laptop it was earned on, with visitor badge 065 still attached. 📜🪪

“KIBBUTZ changed how I think about AI agents. An agent isn't just an LLM in a loop: it needs an identity, a role, scoped permissions and someone accountable above it. The more autonomy you give AI, the stronger the infrastructure around it has to be. Top 15, 3 days of chaos, and back to building. 🚀”

Next hackathon

DOMINATION: The Frontend Challenge

← All hackathons