Building a Safety-First RAG Triage Agent in Python

On May 1st, I participated in HackerRank Orchestrate 2026 — a 24-hour hackathon where the challenge was deceptively simple: build a terminal-based support triage agent that handles tickets across HackerRank, Claude, and Visa using only a provided support corpus.

top 200 globally, top 1.2% — in my first ever hackathon.

Solo. No team. No paid tools.

The catch? No hallucinations. No unsafe replies. Zero tolerance for wrong answers on fraud or billing tickets.

Here's how I built a hybrid RAG agent that prioritizes safety over speed — and why I burned through 3 API keys in the process.