Obigation Engine (Autonomous Agent)

An autonomous AI agent that seamlessly ingests your Slack, Gmail, and Zoom communications to extract, track, and proactively fulfill your scattered obligations.

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Inspiration

As developers and students, our daily lives are a chaotic stream of information. Between Slack channels blowing up, our Gmail inboxes overflowing, and endless Zoom standups, we are constantly making promises. "I'll send that by 3 PM," or "I'll push that code tonight."

But keeping track of these scattered commitments requires manually writing them down in a separate to-do app, which interrupts our flow state. We wanted to eliminate the cognitive load of task management. We asked ourselves: What if an AI agent could just listen to our communication streams, understand exactly what we promised, and actively manage those obligations for us? That idea birthed the Obligation Engine.

What it does

The Obligation Engine is a fully autonomous AI Chief of Staff. It seamlessly hooks into your digital life and extracts action items without you lifting a finger.

Autonomous Ingestion: It uses official APIs (Gmail, Slack, and Zoom Server-to-Server) to continuously monitor your communications. Intelligent Extraction: It passes raw text and cloud transcripts through an LLM to identify promises, deadlines, priorities, and counterparties. Proactive Fulfillment: When you miss a deadline, the engine doesn't just send you a dumb push notification. It understands the context of the missed obligation and proactively drafts a personalized apology email or Slack message. All you have to do is click "Approve", and the engine sends it to your teammate on your behalf.

How we built it

We built the Obligation Engine using a modern, scalable full-stack architecture:

Backend: The core engine is built in Python using FastAPI. We built a robust ingestion pipeline that authenticates with Google Cloud, Slack API, and Zoom APIs. The extraction logic utilizes OpenAI's LLMs to perform sophisticated Natural Language Processing on the ingested data. Frontend: We built a stunning, dynamic dashboard using React, Vite, and TailwindCSS. The UI features real-time synchronization, glassmorphism aesthetics, and a time-travel simulation interface to demonstrate the backend's proactive fulfillment capabilities. AI Pair Programming: We built this entire architecture in just 4 days by heavily leveraging advanced autonomous AI coding agents (specifically the brand new Codex 5.6) to rapidly prototype and integrate complex OAuth flows and React components.

Challenges we ran into

Building an autonomous system in a weekend was no small feat.

OAuth & API Complexities: Integrating with three massive enterprise ecosystems (Google, Slack, and Zoom) simultaneously meant navigating complex authentication flows, permissions, and webhook architectures. Context Window Limitations: Processing massive Zoom transcripts was challenging. We had to build chunking mechanisms to ensure the LLMs didn't drop context or hallucinate obligations that didn't exist. AI Quota Limits: Midway through the hackathon, we hit our OpenAI API quota limits! We had to pivot quickly and engineer a robust fallback mechanism that could gracefully handle API rate limits and keep the application running.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are incredibly proud of building a truly autonomous agent. Most hackathon projects are simple wrappers around an LLM chat interface. The Obligation Engine operates invisibly in the background. We are especially proud of the Time Travel Simulation Engine we built into the dashboard, which allows us to instantly demo exactly how the system reacts to missed deadlines hours into the future.

What we learned

We learned that the true power of AI isn't in conversational chatbots, but in invisible, autonomous agents that connect existing software ecosystems. We also gained massive experience in full-stack integration, learning how to bridge React, FastAPI, and enterprise APIs into a cohesive, production-ready monorepo.

What's next for Obigation Engine (Autonomous Agent)

The next step is expanding our integration suite. We want to add support for Discord, Microsoft Teams, and Jira. We also plan to implement an automated calendar block feature, where the agent will actually look at your Google Calendar and carve out time slots for you to complete the obligations it finds!

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