# Self-Evolving Chip-Design Harness

- **Event:** [The Harness Engineering & Model Wrangling Hackathon](https://cerebralvalley.ai/e/mongodb-nyc-hackathon)
- **When:** Sat, Sep 26 at 9:00 AM – 10:00 PM (EDT)
- **Where:** New York, NY
- **Team:** [Chris Martin](https://cerebralvalley.ai/u/cmart365)
- **GitHub:** https://github.com/chmartin/chip-harness/
- **Demo video:** https://drive.google.com/file/d/1YAXZVXYoeIuzy_1zMvc_bQsqnz4nK6FO/view?usp=sharing
- **Gallery:** https://cerebralvalley.ai/e/mongodb-nyc-hackathon/hackathon/gallery
- **Page:** https://cerebralvalley.ai/e/mongodb-nyc-hackathon/hackathon/gallery/5

**Self-Evolving Chip-Design Harness**: an AI harness that fixes its own agents, proven where results can't be faked.

Getting a chip to hit its clock speed is a slow, expert loop: every change must be re-verified and fully placed and routed before you know if it helped. AI agents can run that loop, but humans still hand-tune the harness around them. We made the harness tune itself. Strands agents (models via OpenRouter) rewrite a multiply-accumulate array's Verilog; every design is gated by a randomized testbench and scored by full open-source place-and-route (Yosys + OpenROAD). When progress stalls, an evolution agent reads the trial history in MongoDB Atlas, diagnoses why, and writes a new harness version (prompt, tools, context, compute policy), kept only if it beats its parent.

## More from The Harness Engineering & Model Wrangling Hackathon

- [Vision](https://cerebralvalley.ai/e/mongodb-nyc-hackathon/hackathon/gallery/2)
- [APA](https://cerebralvalley.ai/e/mongodb-nyc-hackathon/hackathon/gallery/3)
- [SubmissionAI](https://cerebralvalley.ai/e/mongodb-nyc-hackathon/hackathon/gallery/4)
- [Hindsight](https://cerebralvalley.ai/e/mongodb-nyc-hackathon/hackathon/gallery/6)
- [Agent Evolve](https://cerebralvalley.ai/e/mongodb-nyc-hackathon/hackathon/gallery/7)
- [SwipeHome](https://cerebralvalley.ai/e/mongodb-nyc-hackathon/hackathon/gallery/8)

---

Markdown version of https://cerebralvalley.ai/e/mongodb-nyc-hackathon/hackathon/gallery/5. Site index for agents: https://cerebralvalley.ai/llms.txt · full text: https://cerebralvalley.ai/llms-full.txt