Spencer Morris
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CASE STUDY / 02 2 MIN READ

Astra HQ

A desktop office of AI employees, built in one day with Pablo Zavala and Nathan Cheng. It won first place at OpenAI’s GPT-6 Astra hackathon in New York City.

Hackathon project / 1st placeVisit project ↗
Astra HQ desktop app with a 3D isometric office of four AI employees at their desks and a team chat panelView full size ↗
The office: one goal at the top, the team working in 3D, and chat beside it. The amber marker means an employee has work to review. Frame from the team’s demo video.
Execution / THE APPROACH

A working product by the end of the day.

Three of us met that morning and had to ship a working desktop app by the evening demo. We scoped to one complete story, from goal to roadmap to approved launch, and rehearsed it on the packaged build so nothing new broke on stage. It won first place, and we went on to OpenAI DevDay.

01 / THE PROBLEM

What needed solving.

Show what it would feel like to run a small company of AI employees: one goal, a team that splits it into work, and a human who approves the results. It had to be built from scratch, and working, between the morning kickoff and the evening demo.

02 / SYSTEM OUTLINE
  1. 01One goal
  2. 02Roadmap of agent work
  3. 03CEO approves results

Simplified from the implementation and project notes.

03 / TECHNICAL DECISIONS

How it fits together.

A goal becomes a dependency graph

The CEO sets one goal. Astra HQ turns it into milestones with owners and dates, and only hands out a step once the steps it depends on have been approved.

Employees are real agent sessions

Each employee is a persistent Codex session on the user’s ChatGPT plan, with an optional OpenAI API path. Remote tools require explicit approval.

Approval is the main interaction

Work comes back to the CEO as a draft: an email reply, a set of campaign images, a landing page. Approving it moves the roadmap forward; rejecting it sends feedback to the employee.

My part

I wrote 44 of the 74 commits: the local office runtime and Codex transport, the isolated Electron runtime bridge, cancellation and sign-in race fixes, the pixel office scene, the authenticated demo-trigger server, and the resumable launch story with checkpoints and retakes we used on stage.

Review dialog titled Approve reply to Thrive Capital, showing an AI assistant’s draft email with approve and request-changes buttonsView full size ↗
The assistant drafts an investor reply and waits for approval. Sample content from the demo; nothing was sent.
File preview of three AI-generated marketing images with a button to send the chosen one to the software engineerView full size ↗
The marketing intern offers three campaign images. The chosen one goes to engineering for the landing page.
The Astra HQ office at night with confetti after the product launch finishedView full size ↗
Once every milestone is approved, the office switches to party mode.
04 / WORKING METHOD

Building and checking it.

Three people who met that morning built the whole app during the event, as the rules required. All 74 commits fall between 11:28 AM and 7:07 PM on September 10, 2026.

We rehearsed the demo against the packaged app, not the dev build, which caught archive file-read problems before going on stage. First place came with OpenAI credits and DevDay 2026 tickets, and we attended DevDay afterward.

05 / STATUS & LIMITS

Astra HQ is a hackathon project. The repository has had no development since the event, and the app needs a ChatGPT sign-in to run. The screenshots are frames from the team’s demo video and show sample content; the investor reply in one of them was never sent.

Source notes

Where discussed, operating scope and training experience were supplied by Spencer Morris in November 2026. Technical details are based on repository code and project records reviewed on October 30, 2026. Historical checks are described as recorded, not rerun for this article. Screenshots, renders, and mockups are labeled individually.

  • https://github.com/pazare/astra-hq
  • https://youtu.be/X9f01sa6qQw (demo video)
  • https://cerebralvalley.ai/e/openai-gpt-6-astra-nyc/hackathon/gallery/8 (1st place)
  • https://www.linkedin.com/posts/openai-for-startups_whats-something-you-wish-existed-at-activity-7510532178087297024-Cttu
  • https://www.primicias.ec/ciencia-tecnologia/pablo-zavala-ecuatoriano-ganador-openai-agentes-ia-chatgpt-135091/
  • DevDay attendance supplied by Spencer Morris, November 2026
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