HackerRank Orchestrate

Starter repository for the HackerRank Orchestrate 24-hour hackathon (May 1–2, 2026).

Build a terminal-based AI agent that triages real support tickets across three product ecosystems; HackerRank, Claude, and Visa — using only the support corpus shipped in this repo.

Read problem_statement.md for the full task spec, input/output schema, and allowed values, and evalutation_criteria.md for how submissions are scored.

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Contents

1. Repository layout
2. What you need to build
3. Where your code goes
4. Quickstart
5. Chat transcript logging
6. Submission
7. Judge interview
8. Evaluation criteria

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Repository layout

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├── AGENTS.md                       # Rules for AI coding tools + transcript logging
├── problem_statement.md            # Full task description and I/O schema
├── README.md                       # You are here
├── code/                           # ← Build your agent here
│   └── main.py                     #   Entry point (rename/extend as you like)
├── data/                           # Local-only support corpus (no network needed)
│   ├── hackerrank/                 #   HackerRank help center
│   ├── claude/                     #   Claude Help Center export
│   └── visa/                       #   Visa consumer + small-business support
└── support_tickets/
    ├── sample_support_tickets.csv  # Inputs + expected outputs (for development)
    ├── support_tickets.csv         # Inputs only (run your agent on these)
    └── output.csv                  # Write your agent's predictions here

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What you need to build

A terminal-based agent that, for each row in support_tickets/support_tickets.csv, produces:

Column	Allowed values
status	replied, escalated
product_area	most relevant support category / domain area
response	user-facing answer grounded in the provided corpus
justification	concise explanation of the routing/answering decision
request_type	product_issue, feature_request, bug, invalid

Hard requirements (from problem_statement.md):

• Must be terminal-based.
• Must use only the provided support corpus (no live web calls for ground-truth answers).
• Must escalate high-risk, sensitive, or unsupported cases instead of guessing.
• Must avoid hallucinated policies or unsupported claims.

Beyond that you are free to bring your own approach — RAG, vector DBs, tool use, structured output, agent frameworks, classical ML, or anything else.

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Where your code goes

All of your work belongs in code/. The repo ships with an empty code/main.py you can grow into your full agent — add more modules (agent.py, retriever.py, classifier.py, etc.) next to it as needed.

Conventions:

• Put a README inside code/ describing how to install dependencies and run your agent.
• Read secrets from environment variables only (OPENAI_API_KEY, ANTHROPIC_API_KEY, …). Copy .env.example → .env (already gitignored) if you keep one. Never hardcode keys.
• Be deterministic where possible. Seed any random sampling.
• Write responses to support_tickets/output.csv.

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Quickstart

Clone this repository:

git clone git@github.com:interviewstreet/hackerrank-orchestrate-may26.git
cd hackerrank-orchestrate-may26

You are free to use any language or runtime. We recommend Python, JavaScript, or TypeScript.

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Chat transcript logging

This repo ships with an AGENTS.md that any modern AI coding tool (Cursor, Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI, Copilot, etc.) will read. It instructs the tool to append every conversation turn to a single shared log file:

Platform	Path
macOS / Linux	$HOME/hackerrank_orchestrate/log.txt
Windows	%USERPROFILE%\hackerrank_orchestrate\log.txt

You don't need to do anything to enable it — just use your AI tool normally. You'll upload this log.txt as your chat transcript at submission time.

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Submission

Submit on the HackerRank Community Platform: https://www.hackerrank.com/contests/hackerrank-orchestrate-may26/challenges/support-agent/submission

You will upload three files:

1. Code zip — zip your code/ directory and upload it. Exclude virtualenvs, node_modules, build artifacts, the data/ corpus, and the support_tickets/ CSVs.
2. Predictions CSV — your agent's output for support_tickets/support_tickets.csv (i.e. the populated output.csv).
3. Chat transcript — the log.txt from the path in Chat transcript logging.

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Judge interview

After a successful submission, your AI Judge interview will happen within a few hours after the hackathon ends. It will stay open for the next 4 hours.

The AI Judge will have access to your submission and may ask about your approach, decisions, and how you used AI while building your solution. The interview will be 30 minutes long, and keeping your camera on is mandatory.

Results will be announced on May 15, 2026

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Evaluation criteria

Submissions are scored across four dimensions: agent design (your code/), the AI Judge interview, output accuracy on support_tickets/output.csv, and AI fluency from your chat transcript.

See evalutation_criteria.md for the full rubric.