I Built a Hermes Agent to Tell Me Which Hackathons to Enter. It Told Me to Enter This One.

This is a submission for the Hermes Agent Challenge: Build With Hermes Agent

What I Built

I started AI-assisted building in July 2025. Self-taught, learning as I go. Hackathons and challenges turned out to be a big part of how I got better, structured lessons to build something inside a deadline, and the DEV challenge feed became one of my regular places to look.

But the more I leaned on it, the more I kept hitting the same question: how do I decide which challenge to enter? It is not trivial. Entering the wrong one costs days I do not get back. And you cannot always tell from a challenge page alone whether it fits the stack I build with, whether there is enough runway left, or whether the learning is worth the hours. The feed does not sort itself by worth it. So you either check it obsessively, miss things, or enter on a hunch and hope for the best.

Vigil Crest is the filter I wanted. It is a challenge triage agent I talk to on Telegram. I message it, it browses the live challenge feed, and it sends back a verdict on each active challenge. For every one it gives me four short fit lines, Time, Learning, Stack fit, and Timing, a paragraph of reasoning, and a call: enter, skip, or maybe.