James Leung
Hey! I'm James. I like making things, and I especially like getting other people to make things. I studied Computer Science at Cambridge, and I'm spending this summer in San Francisco doing mechanistic interpretability research: right now, I'm trying to train a model to take a concept description and turn it into the weights of a classifier for that concept.
I started Quack, a cosy Cambridge co-working group for passion projects; I ran CamHack (theme: Unintended Behaviour) and Cambridge Game Jam; and I founded Cambridge Battlecode. I read too much sci-fi (Foundation, Children of Time, The Dispossessed), play piano, and will argue that Blood on the Clocktower is the best social deduction game ever made. If any of this sounds fun, or you just want to say hi, drop me a message.
Selected work
All projects →- 2026–in progressProbe GeneratorsCan you train a metamodel to turn a natural-language description of a concept straight into the weights of a classifier for it?
- 2025CamHack & Cambridge Game JamLead organiser of Cambridge's largest hackathon: 300+ students, 30 hours, theme 'Unintended Behaviour'. Highlights included a piano that types and a 'misinterpreter' that compiles up from C to Python to Mindustry. Then had the idea for a game jam open to board games as well as video games (theme: 'Set in Stone'), and ran that too.camhack.orgcamgamejam.comwhy hackathons should be useless
- 2026Cambridge BattlecodeAn international programming competition I founded: 1,500+ participants write Python bots for a Factorio-style game, and the bots fight it out on an online Elo ladder. Inspired by MIT Battlecode.battlecode.camlore snippet
Writing & notes
All writing →- Feb 2026noteBattlecode Lore: Programme AcceptanceThe in-universe acceptance letter every Cambridge Battlecode competitor receives from Meridian Industries.
- Dec 2025essayWhy Your Next Hackathon Should Be "Useless" — The Philosophy Behind CamHackA case for running hackathons that optimise for fun, creativity, and community, rather than utility or polish.