I used my AI newsroom playbook to finish top ten in Google's four-week hacking challenge on opening night
A live leaderboard screenshot showed my merket account in ninth place with all nine numbered challenges solved; the collaboration produced a reported top-10 finish, not a confirmed final placement.
By Ryan Merket · Published · Updated
Primary source: X
Why it matters
Merket's post puts a personal result against a clear timeline: FLARE-On 13 had opened only hours earlier and is scheduled to run four weeks. It is an early standing, not a final contest result.
I applied the AI-assisted investigation workflow I use at RuntimeWire to Google's FLARE-On 13 reverse-engineering challenge. A live leaderboard screenshot showed my merket account in ninth place with all nine numbered challenges solved. The collaboration produced a reported top-10 finish, but the screenshot is a contest snapshot, not an official final ranking. I used AI agents; I did not reverse-engineer nine binaries entirely by hand.
My role was to supply the challenge files, manage the competition account, and submit answers. Codex inspected the files, developed explanations, wrote analysis programs, and tested recovered answers. The work documented here covers challenges 3 through 9, plus an investigation of a suspected bonus challenge.
The challenges called for a mix of file analysis, program inspection, network forensics, cryptography, and number theory. Codex helped trace embedded files, examine custom routines, analyze captured traffic, and test candidate answers. One challenge's README contained its flag, so we did not need to reverse-engineer the advertised game.
The workflow moved quickly when we narrowed each problem to a specific question, such as where a key came from or what input a checker would accept. Small analysis programs handled repetitive work, and checks against original code helped verify results. For example, two independent approaches to one decryption produced the same output, and the original checker accepted a generated input for another challenge.
Google's challenge announcement said the contest would run for four weeks starting September 25th at 8 p.m. Eastern. The materials available for this story do not include timestamped workflow records, so they do not establish an exact completion time or document every assignment, failure, and validation step.