TECHIRELANDNATIONAL

CHALLENGE2026

Akella inMotion

Blueprint

Part 01 of fourThe jump.

Three decisions settle this competition, and all three are made before you write a line of code. Who is on the team. What the idea actually is. What you build it with.

Get them right and the fortnight is execution. Get them wrong and no amount of work in week two rescues it.

Start with the team

Team

Decided in a week, before anything else, and it constrains everything after it.

Five to nine people, all on the island
One leader who owns the submission
Roles named before anyone opens an editor

Done when: every outcome has exactly one name against it.

Idea

Not a topic. One pain, felt by one named person, that you can show working.

A pain somebody has this week
Small enough to demo in ninety seconds
Three or four screens, no more

Done when: you can say it in one sentence and show it in one flow.

Stack

Chosen once, on day one, and never revisited. Every hour here is an hour off the build.

Managed, boring, already deployed
One signup covering database, auth and storage
Nothing anyone has to learn this fortnight

Done when: a live URL exists on day one, broken but deployed.

A demo that wins the room.

14 September, at your hub, in front of evaluators.

The calendar

Building stops at 2pm on 13 September, not on the 14th.

Slides are due the day before you present. Plan the fortnight against that deadline and the last day becomes rehearsal instead of panic.

21 AugTeams formedFind your people on the challenge platform. Designate a team leader.
24 AugTeam details due*Send the organisers your member list. Five to nine people, all in Ireland or Northern Ireland.
28 AugKeys land, build opens*Google and OpenAI keys go to team leaders. Two weeks of remote build begins.
13 SeptSlides due, 2pm*Final slides and presentation submitted. This, not the 14th, is when building stops.
14 SeptIn person at your hub*Arrive, practise the pitch, demo to evaluators. Bring the laptop and your working notes.
16 SeptTop teams announcedFinalists named.
24 SeptNational AI Meet, GalwayFinalists present at the Galmont Hotel to industry, investors and policymakers.

* miss one of these and you are out. Dates from the organisers and subject to change, so treat the challenge platform as the source of truth.

5 to 9: people per team, all based in Ireland or Northern Ireland.
12: working days between the keys landing and slides being due.
1: named leader, who owns the submission and the API keys.
Free: to enter, with Google and OpenAI keys provided.

Five to nine people, one named leader, and a split between building it and getting it across. Decided this week, and it constrains everything after it.

01 Team · 01 of 06

Overview

No judge is going to read your code.

They get a few minutes with you. In that time they work out whether the problem is real, whether the thing in front of them works, and whether they believe you. The repository never enters it.

That is not an argument for building less. It is an argument for staffing the other half of the job: the research that finds the pain, the screens that make it legible, and the story that lands it in a room that has already seen thirty demos.

A team of nine builders loses to a team of four builders and three people who spent the fortnight on the problem and the pitch.

The golden rule

Work as if you are on your own.

Not because your team will let you down. Because it is a fortnight in late summer, and somebody will get sick, or start a job, or lose a weekend they could not move.

Plan so that any one person going quiet is survivable. Everything in the repo, never on a laptop. Credentials reachable by two people. Setup steps written down while they are still boring. Then when everyone does show up, you are simply ahead.

5 to 9

people, all based in Ireland or Northern Ireland.

named leader, who owns the submission and the keys.

24 Aug

is when the organisers need your member list. 5pm.

Still to come

Challenge Blueprint, parts two to four.

The build

The eighteen-day map, the freeze, and what to simulate instead of build.

The room

How judging actually works, the pitch clock, and the questions you will be asked.

After

Why seven percent of projects survive six months, and what the other ninety three did wrong.

Starter pack

Take the whole page as one Markdown file.

Drop it in the root of your repo. Every coding assistant your team uses will read it as project context, so it stops suggesting custom auth and a Kubernetes cluster and starts working inside the constraints you actually have.

challenge-blueprint-01-the-jump.md

your-repo/

├── src/

├── README.md

└── challenge-blueprint-01-the-jump.md

Contains the calendar, the roles, the kill sheet, every stack option with its free-tier trap, and a short brief telling an agent what is out of scope.

Coming in later parts: prompt packs for the build, agent protocols and tool definitions, an evaluation harness you can point at your own golden set, and the pitch scripts. Each part will extend this same file, so re-downloading keeps one source of truth in your repo.

Mentor slots

Bring me the messy stuff.

Scoping, half-built prototypes, is-this-even-feasible questions. Thirty minutes, booked through the TechIreland app. Book early, while there is still time to act on the answer.

Book in the TechIreland app Or message the studio