Developer builds AI tool to validate planning objections at NSW council hackathon

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A developer built Setback, an AI-powered tool, over a weekend for Google's All Things Agentic Hackathon, designed to help residents craft legally valid objections to development applications in New South Wales. The tool analyzes a resident's submission against the statutory list of grounds councils are permitted to consider under NSW planning law, filtering out irrelevant concerns such as property value impacts or personal grievances. Each rejected ground is explained to the resident in plain English, along with guidance on what would make it legally viable. The project was built using a multi-agent AI coding workflow, where several agents worked concurrently on separate parts of the codebase rather than the developer writing code line by line. The build surfaced critical bugs — including silently discarded uploaded evidence and a misconfigured API fallback — that only became apparent through end-to-end testing on live infrastructure, not unit tests or code reviews.

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