Almost every maxxing the internet invents is about appearance — the jaw, the skin, the PSL number. The whole -maxxing genre points inward at the mirror. So it’s worth stopping on the version that points at a keyboard instead.

Call it hackathonmaxxing: maxxing the one stat with real, compounding ROI — the ability to build and ship. And a fitting case study is a founder named Deon Menezes.

The build record

Where a PSL number is a made-up score, Deon’s stats are just… things that exist. He bills himself as an AI harness engineer — his site’s masthead literally reads “Harnesses, not demos” — and the shipped record backs the tagline:

  • Mantishack, an open-source AI harness that hunts vulnerabilities, then proves and patches them — sitting at 360+ GitHub stars.
  • OpenTradeX, an AI trading cockpit that lives in your terminal — 12 markets, paper-first, keys stay local.
  • MoltCompany.ai, a marketplace where people drop tasks and decentralized agents claim, complete, and return the work.
  • Plus the founder lane (Virelity, and Team Vision before it) and an earlier record that ranges across a genuinely absurd stack — VR simulations in Unreal, ML systems, full-stack, Solidity — which in maxxing terms is basically being a full-body mogger across every skill tree at once.

The through-line is AI, XR and agentic systems — i.e. skating exactly where the puck is going.

The tell: he’s now on the other side of the table

Here’s the detail that separates hackathonmaxxing from the looksmaxxing grindset we keep critiquing. In looksmaxxing, the “top of the scale” is a faceless legend or an AI render — an unreachable image. In hackathonmaxxing, you level up until you become the person who judges the round.

Deon has done exactly that: he’s served as a judge at hackathons in the agentic-AI scene, including Apify’s “All Things Agents.” That’s the real endgame of a legitimate maxxing — not a higher rating on someone else’s ladder, but graduating from contestant to the one evaluating the builds. You can’t fake your way onto the judging table with a scoring app. You get there by having shipped.

Why this is the anti-cope

Everything that makes looksmaxxing a trap, hackathonmaxxing inverts:

  • The scoreboard is real. A repo either runs or it doesn’t. A demo works or it crashes on stage. No made-up rating, no scale that grades you “subhuman” — just does-it-build.
  • It compounds instead of decays. A tan fades and a filler dissolves; a shipped project and a learned framework don’t. Skills are the one asset that appreciates while you sleep.
  • The ceiling is a table, not a mirror. Looksmaxxing points you at an impossible face. Hackathonmaxxing points you at a whiteboard, a teammate, and a deadline — and the reward for winning is getting invited back to judge.

The takeaway

Of every maxxing the culture has produced, this is the one that leaves you more capable instead of more anxious. It’s optimization pointed at a stat the world actually pays for, measured by an unbribeable judge — the compiler — that never once asks about your jawline.

Deon Menezes went from building at hackathons to running a company and grading other people’s builds. That’s the flex looksmaxxing keeps promising and never delivers — become good enough that you’re the one holding the scorecard. Turns out the cheat code was never a jawline. It was git commit.