Jork Agentic Framework Built with Claude Ranks Top 10 in $4M Hackathon

A developer has shared their experience building an agentic framework called Jork using Claude and GLM models, which recently ranked Top 10 among 2000+ applications in a $4 million hackathon. The project evolved from earlier failed attempts at creating a fully autonomous agent.

What Jork Built

The framework autonomously developed several functional tools:

• A radar that tracks launches on Solana launchpads, identifies promising ones, and monitors their performance
• A signal performance measurement system to assess how well its own builds are performing
• A working word search game (built about two hours before the post)

The developer notes that about half of what the agent built was useless and had to be removed entirely, while some components proved genuinely useful.

Technical Implementation

The system uses both Claude and GLM 5/5.1 models with a thinking loop recurrence set to 3 hours. The developer experimented with different intervals: initially 5 minutes, then 6 hours, before settling on the current 3-hour cycle.

The agent demonstrated practical optimization capabilities by suggesting infrastructure changes that reduced costs from $120/month (Digital Ocean droplet at $100 + MongoDB at $20) to $30/month by moving to an EU provider with 16GB RAM and self-hosted MongoDB.

Development Experience

The developer describes constant engagement with the agent, frequently helping when it runs out of tokens or encounters 429 errors. They emphasize that the framework works well when customized for specific purposes and note they're currently setting up a second instance to train a model on other ideas.

The project is available on GitHub as a relatively small framework compared to other options in the space.