Pick a real open issue on a public GitHub repo, use CyOps to ship a working PR that closes it, and get bonus credit if it gets merged upstream by maintainers who didn't know it was AI-built. The strongest submissions are PRs maintainers actually want to land — features, bug fixes, performance improvements, or test coverage that has been missing for months.

Build a Model Context Protocol server that other developers will actually install. The MCP ecosystem is having a moment — we're looking for wrappers for services builders use daily, workflow-specific MCPs (deployment, on-call, observability, secrets), and primitives other MCP authors will depend on. Bonus credit if the server gets traction during the hackathon window.

Take a real codebase and ship a substantive refactor in 7 days. Library migrations across 50+ files, pattern modernization repo-wide, bug-class elimination, architectural cleanup — the kind of work that has been on a team's backlog for months. Output is a series of cleanly-scoped PRs against a fork with measurable before/after metrics.

Bring an abandoned project back to life. Builders pick their own half-finished side project, a famously stale open-source library, or a CLI tool whose dependencies all broke, and use CyOps to finish it. Winning submissions in this track are the ones where the narrative — this thing was dead, and now it works — is as compelling as the code itself.