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About Terac

Terac is the expert network powering frontier research. We make human labor accessible on-demand through a simple API. You tell us what job needs to be done and what kind of expert you need: we handle sourcing, screening, verification, and payouts.

We've raised $9M from Emergence, SignalFire, Audacious, and Z Fellows. We believe that as AI agents start running companies, the bottleneck won't be code, it'll be access to the right human at the right time.

We're hiring in-person engineers in San Francisco. If you build something great this weekend, we want to talk.

Our Berkeley Hackathon Challenge

Most hackathon projects never meet a single real user before the demo. Teams build on instinct, train on whatever data is lying around, and hope it lands. This year, we want to raise the bar: put your project in front of real people, live, and use what they tell you to make it measurably better.

This track is about using real human input you collect yourself during the hackathon to make your project meaningfully better. That input might be product feedback, user testing, expert judgment, or labeled training data. You don't have to train a model to win; what matters is that real human judgment changed your project for the better and you can show it.

That means:

  1. Build something real people can respond to. A simple app (a Vercel app works great) where a person uses your product, reacts to it, or labels, rates, ranks, or compares what your system produces.
  2. Call the Terac API/MCP to bring the people. Launch your task on Terac and we'll get real people to complete it. You focus on what you're building, not on recruiting or incentives. That part is on us.
  3. Turn that human input into a better project. Use what you collect however fits: product and UX changes from user feedback, prompt/routing/retrieval changes validated by human judgment, evals built from human labels, or fine-tuning and reward models if training is the right tool. Then show a clear before and after.

Pull that off within 24 hours and you've built something genuinely impressive.

Judging Criteria

Criteria Weight What We're Looking For
Project Improvement 40% A real, credible improvement driven by the human input (ideally a before/after human eval via Terac)
What You Built 35% The app or environment: task design, creativity, and UX
Use of Human Input 25% Smart use of the people you reached (quality of the input, and getting signal efficiently within your credit)

Setup/Guidelines