An ambient AI teammate that watches your pod's screens in realtime — catching merge
collisions, duplicated work, and missed handoffs before anyone pushes.
PodMan was built at the{' '}
AI Engineer World's Fair 2026 Hackathon (June
27–28) against 95+ teams. It took{' '}
2nd place overall, and won both the{' '}
LiveKit track and{' '}
DigitalOcean's Best Use award.
We shipped the live demo in a single sprint — a LiveKit room, Gemini watching the
screen-share, and a voice that speaks up the moment two engineers drift toward the same
code. There wasn't time on the clock to give it a proper home.
So this is that home — and we're actively building PodMan out from the hackathon
prototype into something a team can actually run every day.
{/* what it does */}
}
title="Ambient awareness"
body="Joins your pod's LiveKit room and samples every screen-share in realtime — no bots to invoke, no commands to remember."
/>
}
title="Merge-collision radar"
body="Recognizes when two people are converging on the same files or feature and warns them before the conflict ever reaches a push."
/>
}
title="Duplicated-work detection"
body="Notices when effort overlaps across the team and surfaces it early, so two engineers don't quietly build the same thing."
/>
}
title="Handoff nudges"
body="Speaks up about missed handoffs and stalled threads — and learns which nudges actually helped, so it stays useful, not noisy."
/>
{/* how it works */}
} name="LiveKit" note="Realtime transport for the shared room and voice delivery." />
} name="Gemini" note="Vision + event detection + the live voice that nudges the team." />
} name="MongoDB" note="Engineer state, ownership map, events, and which nudges landed." />