The judges, as a skill.

hack-ideas is the strategist behind this site: 176 real hackathons, 412 verified winners, distilled into 23 named winning patterns. Installed in your agent, it reads any brief, retrieves the analogous events, and produces ideas with receipts — or critiques your pitch in coach mode. Plain markdown + JSON, no harness-specific tooling.

recommended
01

Claude Code

One line installs the whole skill — patterns, both modes, and the full dataset — into your skills directory. Then invoke it with /hack-ideas, or just describe a hackathon: the skill triggers itself.

no skills CLI? curl does the same thing:

or manually: cp -R hack-ideas ~/.claude/skills/ (project-local: .claude/skills/)

02

Cursor & other rules-based agents

Copy the standalone prompt into your project as .cursor/rules/hack-ideas.mdc (add frontmatter with description and alwaysApply: false so it loads on demand). Everything is inlined — all 23 patterns, both modes. Or keep the whole skill directory in your workspace and tell the agent: “Read hack-ideas/SKILL.md and follow it.”

03

Any LLM, no file access

The prompt is fully self-contained: paste it as a system prompt (or the first message), then give your hackathon brief — or your pitch, for coach mode. No files needed; agents with file access can also mount the dataset next to it for organizer-level retrieval.

~18kb of markdown · 23 patterns inlined with receipts