# Blackout

- **Event:** [The Recursive Agents Hackathon](https://cerebralvalley.ai/e/crusoe-recursive-agents-hackathon)
- **When:** Sat, Oct 17 at 9:00 AM – 10:00 PM (PDT)
- **Where:** San Francisco, CA
- **Team:** [Alvaro Luken](https://cerebralvalley.ai/u/alvluken)
- **GitHub:** https://github.com/AlvaroLuken/blackout
- **Demo video:** https://www.loom.com/share/9531329947a24c7192ae554f7a919b29
- **Gallery:** https://cerebralvalley.ai/e/crusoe-recursive-agents-hackathon/hackathon/gallery
- **Page:** https://cerebralvalley.ai/e/crusoe-recursive-agents-hackathon/hackathon/gallery/101

Blackout lets AI agents act on their own without doing anything twice. Agents are starting to send emails, issue refunds and change systems unattended; when one crashes mid-job it re-does work it already did, and it says "done" when it isn't. Blackout sits between the agent and the real world: it writes every side effect down with a stable ID before it happens, checks the outside system's receipts after a crash to see what really happened, and lets only plain code (never the model) decide the job is done. When it can't tell, it escalates to a human.

We built it two ways today. The full runtime: a Nemotron coordinator writes a definition of done that Blackout freezes, a Nemotron repair worker diagnoses and fixes a broken service, we SIGKILL it mid-delivery, and before its replacement continues, Blackout checks each unfinished action against the service's receipts. In 10 paired live runs on a service that can't report job status, Blackout finished cleanly 10/10; the same agent without it 0/10 (16 duplicate deliveries). And a drop-in MCP gateway, published on npm as blackout-mcp, that any MCP agent (including Claude Code) can put in front of its tools. Measured: a Nemotron agent told not to send duplicates, restarted mid-job, duplicated emails in 6 of 10 runs because it re-invented its idempotency key each time; through Blackout, 0 of 10.

All agents run on NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Lightning via Crusoe Managed Inference, about half a cent per mission. Site with a 3D explainer and recorded live race: https://blackout.black. Everything in the repo was built during the event.

## More from The Recursive Agents Hackathon

- [DealMind](https://cerebralvalley.ai/e/crusoe-recursive-agents-hackathon/hackathon/gallery/98)
- [ReForm](https://cerebralvalley.ai/e/crusoe-recursive-agents-hackathon/hackathon/gallery/99)
- [FruitTree.AI](https://cerebralvalley.ai/e/crusoe-recursive-agents-hackathon/hackathon/gallery/100)
- [Turing](https://cerebralvalley.ai/e/crusoe-recursive-agents-hackathon/hackathon/gallery/102)
- [groundhog](https://cerebralvalley.ai/e/crusoe-recursive-agents-hackathon/hackathon/gallery/103)
- [Travel](https://cerebralvalley.ai/e/crusoe-recursive-agents-hackathon/hackathon/gallery/104)

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Markdown version of https://cerebralvalley.ai/e/crusoe-recursive-agents-hackathon/hackathon/gallery/101. Site index for agents: https://cerebralvalley.ai/llms.txt · full text: https://cerebralvalley.ai/llms-full.txt