BountyPilot

Is this bounty worth building, and is it still open? Answers you can check, quote by quote.

BountyPilot is an opportunity triage agent for solo developers who hunt bounties and hackathons. Paste a listing and it tells you GO, REVIEW or SKIP, and if the listing has a link it checks the source to see whether the opportunity already closed or someone else took it. Your queue is remembered across sessions.

Built for the Nebius × NVIDIA Global AI Hackathon — Best Apps and Agents track.

Why

Most of the time spent on bounties is not building, it is triage: is it still open, does it need a live interview, do I have to be hired first, is someone already working on it. Summaries and aggregators go stale — the AnySearch bounty list still reads as open while its linked claim sheet shows every project taken, and a $1,500 GitHub bounty looked free until the API showed it was assigned. BountyPilot checks the canonical source and shows its evidence.

Related MCP server: bounty-mcp

How it uses Nebius Token Factory and NVIDIA Nemotron

• Listing extraction. Each listing is sent to nvidia/nemotron-3-super-120b-a12b on Nebius Token Factory (OpenAI-compatible /v1/chat/completions, response_format: json_schema). Nemotron returns reward, deadline, live-interview gate, pre-hire gate, unpaid wording, submission path and eligibility — and each field must carry a quote copied from the listing.

• Every quote is verified. src/extractor.js checks that each quote appears verbatim in the listing (case and whitespace normalized). Fields whose quote is not found are discarded and reported in the card ("2 unquoted fields discarded"). Nemotron cannot invent a fact into a verdict.

• The rules stay the guardrail. A rule engine (src/analyzer.js) runs on every listing. A verified Nemotron field may add a blocker or fill a missing reward/deadline, but it can never clear a blocker the rules found. Example: the rules do not know that "Finalists present their project on a video call with the judges" is a live gate; Nemotron finds and quotes it, and the verdict becomes SKIP with that sentence in the reply.

• Page verdicts. When a listing page has neither "closed" nor "open" wording the rules can match, Nemotron reads the page and must again quote it; an unquoted answer is ignored and the status stays UNKNOWN.

Measured on the live API (2026-10-05): one triage is a single Token Factory call of ~300 prompt and ~1.4k completion tokens (most of them reasoning), about 7 seconds end to end.

How it uses Tavily

check_liveness answers "is it still open?" from the canonical source:

Statuses: OPEN, CLOSED, CLAIMED, CONTESTED, UNKNOWN. A page that merely lacks "closed" wording is UNKNOWN, not OPEN. During triage, a listing whose link is CLOSED or CLAIMED is filed as skipped automatically.

Architecture

browser (public/) ──/api/converse──▶ conversation.js ──MCP client (in-memory)──▶ MCP server (src/mcp.js)
external MCP clients ──────────── Streamable HTTP /mcp ─────────────────────────▶      9 tools
                                                                                         │
            ┌─────────────────────────────┬──────────────────────────────┬───────────────┴──────┐
            ▼                             ▼                              ▼                      ▼
  extractor.js → Token Factory   liveness.js → GitHub API, Tavily   analyzer.js (rules)   store.js → Redis / file
  (Nemotron, JSON schema)        (+ Nemotron quoted fallback)

The web page is an ordinary MCP client: every answer comes from MCP tool calls, which each turn lists.

MCP tools

analyze_opportunity, save_opportunity, check_liveness, get_opportunity_queue, compare_opportunities, build_submission_plan, set_opportunity_status, daily_briefing, next_best_action.

Run locally

Requires Node.js 22+.

npm install
cp .env.example .env   # add NEBIUS_API_KEY and TAVILY_API_KEY
npm start              # http://127.0.0.1:4310, MCP at /mcp

Every key is optional. Without NEBIUS_API_KEY the app uses the rule engine and the header shows "Nemotron · off"; without TAVILY_API_KEY only GitHub links are checked.

npm test        # 35 tests, no network or keys needed (providers are faked)
npm run smoke   # with the server running: real MCP handshake, all 9 tools present

Configuration

Honest limits

• Liveness can only see what the linked page says. If claim status lives elsewhere (a Google Sheet, a Discord), the answer is UNKNOWN and says so.

• Nemotron's answers vary between runs; the quote check means a run can return fewer fields, never invented ones.

• Intent routing in the conversation is rule-based on purpose, so every step is explainable.

Origin

BountyPilot started on 2026-09-29 as a rule-based MCP server for the Amazon Alexa+ hackathon (ShenJun93/bountypilot-amazon-2026). Everything model- and Tavily-related here — Nemotron extraction with quote verification, check_liveness, the evidence UI, budgets — was built during this hackathon's submission period. Built with AI coding agents; every change was reviewed and tested.

License

MIT