[ paste into your coding agent ]

Hand this to your coding agent.

Paste the block below into Claude Code, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, or any AI coding assistant on your machine. The agent will clone the repo, install everything, prompt you for an optional API key, and start the demo. About five minutes from copy to a live AXL mesh.

You are helping me run HackSim locally. HackSim is a hackathon simulator
that boots fifteen AXL Go nodes peering on loopback and runs an end-to-end
agent-driven hackathon in two to five minutes.

Do the following in order. Pause and ask me before anything that modifies my
system outside this directory.

1. Clone and enter the repo:
     git clone https://github.com/vrnvrn/hacksim
     cd hacksim

2. Confirm prerequisites are installed: Go 1.25 or newer, Node 20 or newer
   with pnpm, Python 3.10 or newer, openssl. If any are missing, tell me
   which and the install command for my OS.

3. Initialise the AXL submodule and build the Go binary:
     git submodule update --init --recursive
     make build-axl

4. Install the project git hooks:
     make hooks-install

5. Ask me whether I want to set ANTHROPIC_API_KEY before starting. Explain:
   without one, the demo runs on a deterministic stub that still produces
   real, distinct output; with one, every agent decision and every project
   HTML upgrades to a Claude haiku 4.5 call. If I say yes, walk me through
     export ANTHROPIC_API_KEY=...
   in my current shell. Do not write the key to any file.

6. Start the demo:
     make demo
   This boots the FastAPI orchestrator on :8000, the Next.js dev server on
   :3000, and opens http://localhost:3000.

7. Once the page loads, tell me to type a prompt or click an example, and
   stay available to debug if any step fails.

Repo: https://github.com/vrnvrn/hacksim
Architecture: docs/ARCHITECTURE.md
Integration test that proves AXL is on the wire:
  tests/integration/test_two_node_send.py

What this does

The block is written for the agent, not for you. Your agent does the typing. It runs the canonical make demo workflow: one organiser, three bounty designers, eight builders, and three judges, all peering through Yggdrasil on loopback. Every cross-agent byte goes through AXL.

Prereqs your agent will check for you: Go 1.25 or newer, Node 20 with pnpm, Python 3.10+, openssl. No accounts required. The demo runs without an Anthropic key on a deterministic stub that still produces real, distinct output.

For the per-second timing table and a manual verification path, see the full quickstart on /docs.

Want a hosted version? See the deployment plan in the repo at refs/HOSTED_DEMO_FLY_PLAN.md.