Case Study — Vol. 01

eMerge Americas 2026

Miami · April 18, 2026

Live at uxmilena.github.io

WE BUILT A
POLICY OS
IN 8 HOURS.

I've done a few hackathons. Never placed. My contribution always stopped at the slide deck — I could define the problem, shape the pitch, make it look good. But I couldn't ship anything.

That used to be the ceiling.

Building with AI as a designer broke it. This was our first real deployment — and we got it live, got recognized, and landed 3rd place. Eight hours, two people, one shot.

Something I'm actually proud of.

Hackathon Enterprise AI FastAPI Claude API HR Tech Federal Register Wildcard Track

3^rd

PLACE · Wildcard Track
eMerge Americas 2026

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The Problem

01 / 08

Compliance is
broken for HR

Every company with remote employees in more than one state has a compliance problem. Most just don't know it yet. The laws change weekly. The handbook doesn't. The gap is where penalties come from.

Laws change constantly

California updates its sick leave policy. New York changes its pay transparency requirements. Illinois rolls out new predictive scheduling rules. None of them tell your HR team. None of them sync to your employee handbook. Something shifts every week — usually in a state you weren't watching.

No system to track it

Most companies are still tracking this manually — Google Alerts, legal newsletters, someone's bookmarks folder. The average mid-market HR team spends 14 hours a month on compliance monitoring, with no guarantee they caught everything. And no link between what changed in law and what needs to change in policy.

Remote work made it exponential

Post-2020, 68% of companies added employees in new states. Most have never updated their policies to match. Every hire in a new state is a potential liability they don't know about. That's the gap Canon is designed to close.

$0.0B

Annual US labor violation penalties — most preventable

No audit trail

Even when policies do get updated, it happens over email, in Word docs, over Slack DMs. There's no version history, no approval chain, no record of who changed what and why. When legal comes asking — you have nothing. That's the moment "oversight" becomes "negligence."

How we opened

02 / 08

HELLO MOTHERF*CKERS

⚠

Policy Violation Detected

— Canon AI · flagged 0.3s after input

That's slide one of our pitch deck. It set the tone immediately. The judges got it — Canon doesn't just flag violations after the fact. It catches them before they become problems. That's the whole product in one moment.

The Product

03 / 08

Canon — a Policy OS
for HR teams

Not a chatbot. Not a compliance checklist. A full workflow tool that handles the entire lifecycle of a policy update — from the moment a regulation changes to the moment employees are informed. Every change is version-logged with a full audit trail — who edited, who approved, when, and which regulation triggered it.

MONITOR

Canon pulls live data from the Federal Register API and state DOL feeds. The moment a regulation is published, Canon sees it — filtered by your company's industry, states, and headcount.

Live Data

ANALYZE

Claude compares the new regulation against your specific policy docs and flags exactly what's non-compliant — down to the sentence. Not a vague warning. The exact gap, with context and a suggested replacement.

Core AI

UPDATE

HR edits via type, upload, or voice. Canon suggests compliant replacement text. The change routes to Legal for approval. Full audit trail, immutable version history, every step timestamped.

Workflow

COMMUNICATE

One approved policy → HTML page, Slack post, email draft, and PDF. All in your brand voice. All generated in seconds. HR is done for the day.

Output

● canon.app / policy / remote-work-handbook

v 1.4.2

Paid Sick Leave · CA / NY / IL

LAST EDIT · 2 min ago GAPS · 2 detected APPROVAL · Pending Legal

Section 4.1 — Employees are entitled to accrued paid sick leave beginning on the 30th day of employment, up to 24 hours per year. Sick leave may be used for personal illness, care of family, or safe leave purposes.

Section 4.2 — Notice of intended leave must be provided to a direct supervisor at least 14 days in advance where foreseeable, and as soon as practicable otherwise.

Section 4.3 — Retaliation of any kind is prohibited under federal and state law. Employees may file a complaint with HR or directly with their state Department of Labor.

The AI Layer

04 / 08

How Canon
actually thinks

The thing that makes Canon different isn't the workflow — it's what the AI actually knows. This is the part I'm most proud of.

Trained on your docs

Canon ingests your policy handbook on setup. Every new upload makes it smarter about your language, tone, and coverage gaps. Not generic HR law — your policies.

Company Knowledge Base

Synced to government

Direct to the Federal Register — primary source, not an aggregator. When a regulation drops, Canon filters by your industry, states, and headcount. HR only sees what matters.

Live Regulatory Feed

Finds the exact gap

The engine reads the regulation, reads your policy, points to the exact sentence that's out of date — and drafts a compliant replacement in your brand voice.

Gap Analysis + Output

Why Claude

We built this on the Anthropic Claude API. Even though we got credits for Lovable, i found myself getting generic UI output, and maybe it was my unfamiliarity with the platform, but we had no time to spare to learn a new way. Claude knows my design preferences though my designskill.md so i knew that was the way to go.

Why Federal Register API

Most compliance tools use third-party aggregators — which means lag, noise, and cost. Canon goes direct to the primary source. The Federal Register API is public, real-time, and authoritative. Every regulation Canon flags links back to the original published document.

Your policy · last edited 2021

SRC · handbook.pdf §4.1

Employees are entitled to accrued paid sick leave beginning on the ~~30th day of employment, up to 24 hours per year~~. Sick leave may be used for personal illness, care of family, or safe leave purposes. CA SB 616 · effective Jan 1, 2024 · raises floor to 40 hours

Canon's replacement · compliant

PROPOSED · pending Legal

Employees are entitled to accrued paid sick leave beginning on the 30th day of employment, up to 40 hours (or 5 days) per year, whichever is greater, per CA SB 616. Sick leave may be used for personal illness, care of family, or safe leave purposes. Routed to: legal@company.com · audit #A-1049

→

CANON · CABIN VIEW

Flight Deck

CNN-01 · LIVE

Status● ALL SYSTEMS NOMINAL

Policies Tracked142

Gaps · Open2

Last Sync · FedReg00:00:14 ago

Compliance Score98.2%

Nav Queue

PRIORITY · TOP 3

CA · SB 616Review

NY · AB 1105Draft

IL · HB 3129Approved

Design Direction

05 / 08

Private jet UX.
Not paperwork.

I wanted Canon to feel like something you command, not something you file paperwork into. The brief I gave Claude: private jet UX. HR should feel like they're running compliance, not drowning in it.

Dense, not cluttered

A cockpit shows twenty critical numbers without feeling busy. Every pixel earns its place — no decorative chrome, no stock iconography, no illustration carousels.

Editorial type, monospace data

Bebas Neue for moments. DM Sans for reading. JetBrains Mono for anything a system can verify — timestamps, IDs, compliance scores. Every font has a job.

Red means act

One accent color across the whole product. It marks gaps, routes approvals, and signals the live feed. If it's red, you move on it.

The 8 Hours

06 / 08

Saturday,
0900 to 1700.

This is what actually got done, hour by hour, between the coffee, snacks and the pitch.

Build Timeline

0900 — 1700 · EDT · April 18, 2026