You Founded a Startup. Your AI Agents Are Hallucinating. Your Investors Are Watching
Sound fun? It is, actually.
On March 27, we’re hosting a free, in-person hackathon at the Microsoft Mountain View Campus (1045 La Avenida St, Mountain View, CA) where you’ll build an AI-powered travel planning assistant from scratch — and then make it production-ready with real observability and security controls.
This is part of Microsoft’s What The Hack series: collaborative, challenge-based hackathons where you learn by doing, not by watching someone else’s screen.
🌍 The Scenario: Welcome to WanderAI
You’ve just founded WanderAI, a travel planning startup. Your customers describe their dream trip, and your AI agents craft personalized itineraries.
But here’s the catch — your investors want answers:
- 🔍 Are the agents making good recommendations?
- ⚡ How fast are they responding?
- 🚨 When something breaks, can we debug it?
- ✅ Are the travel plans actually… good?
Your mission: go from “cool demo” to “production-ready AI service” in a single day.
🛠️ What You’ll Build (and Learn)
The hack is structured as 8 progressive challenges:
| # | Challenge | What You’ll Do |
|---|---|---|
| 00 | Prerequisites | Set up your GitHub Codespace |
| 01 | Master the Foundations | Understand agent architecture, tools & orchestration |
| 02 | Build Your MVP | Create a Flask web app + your first AI agent with tool calling |
| 03 | Add OpenTelemetry | Instrument with built-in telemetry, verify traces in console & New Relic |
| 04 | New Relic Integration | Custom spans, metrics, and correlated logging |
| 05 | Monitoring Best Practices | Dashboards, alerting, and production monitoring patterns |
| 06 | LLM Quality Gates | Build evaluation tests and CI/CD quality gates for AI outputs |
| 07 | Platform Security | Configure Microsoft Foundry Guardrails |
| 08 | App-Level Security | Prompt injection detection and blocking |
By the end, you’ll have a fully instrumented, observable, and secure multi-agent AI system. Not bad for one day.
🧰 The Tech Stack
- Microsoft Agent Framework — for building multi-agent orchestrations
- OpenTelemetry — the open standard for traces, metrics, and logs
- New Relic — for sending, visualizing, and alerting on all that telemetry
- Azure — the cloud backbone
- Python + Flask — the app layer
- GitHub Codespaces — zero local setup headaches
🍕 The Details
- When: March 27, 2026
- Where: Microsoft Mountain View Campus, 1045 La Avenida St, Mountain View, CA
- Cost: Free
- Food: Provided
- Duration: ~3–5 hours
- What to bring: Your laptop and curiosity
Who Is This For?
Anyone who’s building (or thinking about building) AI agents and wants to understand what’s happening under the hood. Whether you’re a backend engineer, an ML practitioner, a platform engineer, or just AI-curious — this hack meets you where you are.
No prior experience with New Relic or OpenTelemetry is required. Basic Python and web dev knowledge is helpful.
🎟️ Register Now
Space is limited — grab your seat before it fills up:
See you in Mountain View! 🏔️