Claude Builders Club
Photos from HACK1984 and Workshop 1 tiled at an angle with cards for the winners, this week's workshop and the Claude news, around a Newsletter #3 title card.

Newsletter #3: Northeastern's largest hackathon ever, our first workshop, and the month in Claude

A recap of a big few weeks: Northeastern's largest hackathon ever, our first workshop, what's on this Thursday, and the Claude news worth knowing.

Nov 11, 2026 ยท 4 min read

HACK1984 recap

On November 7 and 8, Claude Builders Club, ACM, REV and AINU took over 300 Mass Ave for HACK1984, Northeastern's largest hackathon ever. Over 24 hours, 83 participants built 32 projects and competed for over $14k in prizes. Thank you to everyone who came out, built something and stayed up way too late with us.

The Claude Builders Club Team

  • Three organizers at the podium walking through the four prize tracks.
  • A keynote speaker with a microphone beside the podium.
  • A hacker's laptop open to the How to Win a Hackathon page, with the HACK1984 logo on screen.
  • The full room from the back, with teams at round tables and a speaker at the front.
  • A keynote speaker from JC&A talking to the room in front of his title slide.
  • A sponsor presenting Bravado, the data layer for prediction markets, to a room of hackers.

The winners

Two projects stole the show: BlindSpot took 1st in two different tracks, and DoubleThink walked away with two prizes.

Privacy-First (main track)

  1. BlindSpot, the medical AI that can't see your patients. (2 wins)
  2. DuckyCode
  3. HuskyHealth

Most Startup-able

  1. DoubleThink: 40 attacks, 0 leaks. The model that holds your secret never reads it. (2 prizes)
  2. Atlas
  3. CallGuard catches scam calls as they happen, and nothing leaves your laptop.

Surge (Tavily + Exa sponsor track)

  1. BlindSpot (2 wins)
  2. Sprout

Signal-to-Dose (Within3 sponsor track)

  1. Signal2Dose, launch intelligence for two lung cancer drugs that never leaves the laptop.
  2. Vitra

Side prizes

  • Big Brother Award: DoubleThink (2 prizes)
  • Best Use of Gradium: Tell

The team behind it

HACK1984 took months of work from our organizers. Smyan Sengupta ran the logistics behind almost everything, from rooms and timing to Discord and Devpost. Sohum Balsara pushed for a theme with real substance and helped bring in funding. Mehr Anand had the vision of a hackathon built by clubs across Northeastern, and his network brought in the partner clubs, speakers and judges. Jackson Lamoureux designed the look of HACK1984, from the website to the graphics.

A huge shout-out to Shourya Yadav, who put an enormous amount of effort into finding our sponsors and securing the funding that made the weekend possible. Without him, there wouldn't have been prizes to compete for. Thank you all for everything you put into this.

Highlights

  • A Mario Kart tournament with organizers and hackers.
  • Teams tried to build towers out of Red Bull cans.
  • A midnight birthday celebration.

Thank you

HACK1984 happened because a lot of people said yes.

Organizing clubs. Claude Builders Club, ACM, REV and AINU.

Sponsors. Tavily, Exa, FuzionX, CodeCrafters, Within3, Team Impact + JC&A, Anthropic, Misneach, Gradium, Elisity, SSOJet, Northeastern SGA, Khoury Kaleidoscope, TechCXO, Bravado, Adobe and Partiful.

Judges. Vaibhav Mahindroo (Salesforce), Armaan Agrawal (Alpha School), Het Patel (FuzionX), Victoria Klimkowski (FuzionX), Sanjay Krishna, Mark Coffey (Misneach), Erin Mistry (Within3), Roman Terekh (Bravado), Syam Dondapati (AIG) and Soledad Perez (Misneach), plus everyone who helped with judging.

And you. Every hacker who built with us.

October recap: Workshop 1

On October 15 we ran our first workshop, Introduction to Claude, Code and Cowork. Everyone built a Canvas- and Google-connected dashboard that manages your schedule, no coding experience needed.

  • A full lecture room of students with laptops open, facing the How Claude actually works title slide.
  • A presenter pointing to the whiteboard while explaining a concept.
  • A presenter in a club quarter-zip speaking from behind the lectern.
  • A presenter in a white shirt and purple tie speaking beside the projector screen.
  • Two students leaning over a laptop to work through a step together, with a tray of croissants on the table.
  • Students in the front rows following along with the presentation.
  • A student in a green sweater talking with someone in the front of the room.

This week

Workshop: Build a Deck Worth Presenting. Thursday, November 12, 6:00 to 7:00 PM, Forsyth 129. Learn how to make presentations with Claude that don't look like AI slop. We'll cover the skills and plugins that make decks look polished, plus how to present better in your classes.

The twist: you pick a topic and build a deck in Claude, then someone else has to present it.

Sign up on Luma

Everything else coming up is on our events page.

Claude news this month

Anthropic filed to go public

On October 26, Anthropic made its IPO paperwork (an S-1) public. It plans to list on Nasdaq under the ticker ANT, and the filing shows $16.3 billion in revenue in the first half of 2026, up from $1.2 billion a year earlier. Our favorite detail: Claude wrote more than 90% of the contributions to Anthropic's own codebase in September. On November 10, Anthropic started its IPO roadshow, the round of investor meetings that comes right before a company's shares start trading. (The Batch, Anthropic)

Claude Duet: Claude messages you first

Regular Claude waits for you to start a chat. Claude Duet, a new app announced on October 21, flips that. It keeps an eye on the apps you connect, like email and calendar, prepares work for you, and pings you when something needs your attention. It asks for your OK before anything sensitive, like sending a message or making a payment. It runs on Claude Opus 5.5 and is a research preview with a waitlist for Pro and Max subscribers in the US. (Claude)

Two new models

Claude Haiku 5.5 (October 7) is Anthropic's cheapest, fastest small model yet, and costs about 75% less to run than Haiku 4.5. Claude Fable 5.2 (November 9) is the new top model for the hardest work, with better coding, reasoning and vision, and output up to 30% faster than Fable 5.1. Its sibling, Claude Mythos 5.2, is limited to vetted organizations. (Haiku 5.5, Fable 5.2)

Slides, Docs and Design are free for everyone

On October 8, Claude Slides, Docs and Design came out of beta and landed on every plan, including Free. That's good news for Thursday: you don't need a paid plan to build your deck. Anthropic also launched two new betas, Dashboards and Motion. (Claude)

Also this month

  • Code Review in Claude Code is now generally available for Team and Enterprise (October 15). (Claude)
  • Anthropic committed 5% of its shares to a new Public Benefit Fund (October 18). (Anthropic)
  • Agent Skills, the open standard behind Claude's skills, was donated to the Agentic AI Foundation, and over 70 platforms have adopted it (October 22). (Anthropic)
  • Anthropic is putting $100 million into the Claude Frontier Academy to train 10,000 engineers (October 2). (Anthropic)