Hackathons I actually joined
What I built, who ran it, and what participants said afterward.
64 projects 61 hackathons
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Clarity
Clarity finds the one vague claim worth asking about, then uses a short adaptive phone call to turn it into a clearer fact, backed by the candidate’s own words.
CALL-E
Details
What participants said
Mid-event, Google sign-in broke and dashboards bounced users straight back to the login page; Call-E's Jason blamed "recent attacks," restricted accounts to @gmail.com addresses, and moved support to email. Entrants in Italy, the Philippines, Nigeria, and Algeria also found their countries' phone numbers unsupported.
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Audition Agent
Audition Agent turns an AI-generated character into a human casting workflow, creating auditions, organizing applicants, and handling follow-up while keeping casting decisions human.
Amazon Web Services
Details
What participants said
Bedrock returned "Operation not allowed" account-wide for several entrants and one team's AgentCore runtime quota sat at zero with an AWS ticket unanswered for six days; Devpost's manager could only repeat that AWS quotas are not hers to raise and that AgentCore "is not required." The $50 credit form never asked for an AWS account ID, and entrants were still hunting for its URL days after the three-business-day window lapsed.
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Payoff
Payoff helps creators design what an audience should feel, then uses real audience reactions to discover whether the story actually got them there.
OpenAI
Details
What participants said
A ChatGPT and Claude outage hit hours before the deadline, and Devpost extended it by 12 hours to entrants' relief, but the challenge page then read "hackathon has ended" and some who submitted minutes past the cutoff reported being rejected at 08:01 UTC. Netlify, Vercel, and Cloudflare credit codes also failed for some.
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Save Peps
Save Peps is a one-tap 3D puzzle game where you choose the right object to reunite two lovable Peps across 12 increasingly wild worlds.
RevenueCat
Details
What participants said
Google Play's twelve-tester, fourteen-day closed-testing rule pushed entrants into swapping installs with each other, and ShipKit claims stalled after the enrollment form. The Next Gen award drew the sharpest edges: its form forced a store-release checkbox that repo-plus-video entries could not honestly tick, and a 12-year-old building under his dad's account was told flatly that no workaround made him eligible.
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Replaceable
Replaceable is a living map of how AI is changing work, showing which jobs may be affected sooner, why, and how those assessments change as new evidence appears.
Cockroach Labs
Details
What participants said
Entrants asked how they were meant to run agent inference on the AWS free tier when Bedrock isn't in it, and how to keep demos deployed through a month of judging; organizers said no AWS credits would be issued and suggested Ollama instead, leaving people with expired free-tier eligibility without an answer. CockroachDB trial credits also expired before judging ended.
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Builder Signal
Turns a technical builder’s real experience into evidence-backed, editable applications tailored to hackathons, fellowships, accelerators, and other selective programs.
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Judge Ops
Helps judges, recruiters, and program reviewers evaluate submissions faster with structured, evidence-backed analysis while keeping scores and final decisions human.
Build with Gemini XPRIZE
2 projectsXPRIZE
Details
What participants said
Devpost closed submissions while the XPRIZE site still showed 10+ hours remaining, and a Devpost outage that day left several teams timed out mid-form, with no organizer reply. Entrants also puzzled over how to use the $300 Google Cloud credits (Devpost pointed them to free AI Studio), and one asked whether anyone else found the $1,495 Moonshot Party ticket unaffordable.
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MotionKey
MotionKey lets you teach your phone custom hand gestures, train a tiny personalized model on Arm64, and use those gestures to control the phone offline.
Arm
Details
What participants said
Track boundaries were the live question, and Arm's Avin Zarlez answered them directly: Apple Silicon Macs count for Mobile AI even though the platform list names only Android, iOS and Windows on Arm, and a project argued well in its readme gets considered for other tracks since "many projects will overlap categories." A last-hours extension request got a flat "Sorry, we were unable to do that."
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FaceState
FaceState turns one selfie into personalized All-Nighter, Time Jump, and Character transformations, using YouCam skin analysis to make each result feel specific to you.
Perfect Corp.
Details
What participants said
Documentation links pointed at a dead perfectcorp domain until someone posted the working makeupar URLs, and several entrants got "invalid code" errors redeeming their API credits and were told to email support. An Italian entrant asked why Italy was excluded again.
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Beatboard
Beatboard turns a comedy idea into a shoot-ready storyboard with timed beats, generated art, voiced dialogue, direction, and dependency-aware revisions in minutes.
Google
Details
What participants said
ClickHouse's $400 trial expired before judging and IBM Bob's 40 free coins burned out in an hour ("it would cost me $200+"), with an organizer's fix being to email support and "tell them Zoe sent you," which went unanswered. A ruling that third-party AI coding assistants were barred sent one entrant back to rebuild from scratch, and his request for replacement Google Cloud credits was refused twice.
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Signal Packet API
Send in a project write-up and get back a report on which of its claims the README and docs actually back up, with quotes as proof. Costs 5 cents per check, paid automatically with x402.
BrainWave 2026
Details
What participants said
Entrants describe a long funnel, 1,000+ teams cut to 150, then 70, then a grand finale at GGSIPU, with a virtual elimination round where evaluators pressed teams to defend every layer of their build; several traced their exit to that depth rather than the idea. Non-winners' writeups are the useful ones: one team learned that preprocessing mismatches across environments silently corrupt every result.
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Signal Review Reel
Give it a project description and its demo video. It watches the video and makes a short narrated clip showing which claims the demo actually proves, which it skips, and which it contradicts.
Backblaze
Details
What participants said
After results, entrants checked their logs and found the shared judge account had never logged in and repo invitations were never accepted ("is this a honest mistake or a sabotage"), and another asked whether their feedback-prize entry was even considered. Earlier, GMI Cloud credits failed to arrive for several people and the promo code hit its redemption limit.
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Signal Evidence Graph
It maps a project's files to the claims they support in DataHub, then an AI agent reads that map and reports which claims the evidence proves. When it can't tell, it says so instead of guessing.
DataHub
Details
What participants said
The DataHub MCP server was the real adversary: one entrant reverse-engineered the protocol "field by field from live error messages" while fighting a Rust toolchain that would not build against his Python version and an auth flag that silently reset on every restart, "nobody puts that part in the demo video." Another upstreamed a hello-world example to DataHub's official MCP repo; late pleas to extend the deadline went unanswered.
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Trajectory
Trajectory turns long ChatGPT conversations into a clear arc, useful findings, and evidence you can trace back to the exact messages.
OpenAI
Details
What participants said
With roughly 46,000 entries chasing six prizes, the post-results forum turned sour: entrants demanded OpenAI "publish the scorecards," questioned how a Windows-to-AirPlay app with commercial equivalents placed second on originality, and called it "a huge token-burning exercise." Some never got the promised $100 Codex credits, and no OpenAI staff replied.
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Save Pip
Save Pip in one tap. Play three tiny rescue puzzles, see instant results, retry freely, and chase a perfect run.
Reddit
Details
What participants said
The winner, a drawing pad many entrants refused to call a game, set off the biggest revolt of Reddit's game hackathons: the top comment on the announcement was "genuinely confused," entrants compared Reddit Journeys data and concluded their games were never played, and two long r/Devvit posts alleged unnamed judges, no scorecards, and "ghost winners." Admins promised clearer criteria next time.
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Escalation Room Society
Seven Qwen agents investigate a family's complaint about a Medicaid therapist listing, verify it using real sources and a phone call, then publish only evidence they can defend.
Alibaba Cloud
Details
What participants said
The $40 Alibaba Cloud vouchers sat "under review" for weeks; organizers admitted a backlog from "overwhelming request" and pointed people to the free tier, while entrants worried about paying out of pocket, couldn't clear Alibaba's account security checks, and found India missing from the country list. Some finished submissions also reverted to draft.
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Escalation Room Live
A Slack agent that turns high-stakes provider updates into one decision card. Reviewers ask questions, request a real verification call, and approve changes before families rely on them.
Slack
Details
What participants said
Sharing the developer sandbox with the judging accounts was the recurring trap: Slack's default template ships seven placeholder users that fill the seat cap, and removals only take at org level. Others hit an intermittent "Hmm, something's gone wrong" on Activate Public Distribution, and the Agent for Good winner has since carried her entry into Slack Exchange review as a real product.
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Pulse
Pulse asks six rival AI models the same builder questions about any model, then publishes their competing takes as one clean page on Aurora PostgreSQL and Vercel.
Amazon Web Services
Details
What participants said
Vercel promo codes expired weeks before the date promised in the email, and Devpost said corrected codes had gone out and handled the rest one-on-one by email. AWS Bedrock throttling pushed at least one entrant to ask whether outside AI providers were allowed (they were), and questions about when winners would be announced sat unanswered.
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Mission Control
Every opportunity becomes a case. Mission Control automatically resolves routine intake and escalates only the cases where human judgment creates greater value.
UiPath
Details
What participants said
Lab access was the recurring blocker: teams got "User does not exist in any organization" errors for days and, once in, sometimes lacked the Maestro access their track required, while others said they felt "extremely lost" with Maestro BPMN. After results, one top-10 finalist claimed they had received a winner's email only to see a different project announced, with no reply.
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Intent Guard
A one-line change can leave an entire project out of sync. Intent Guard uses GitLab Orbit to find what was left behind.
GitLab
Details
What participants said
Orbit's native "Query Graph" agent tool kept reporting "not available" until an entrant found the MCP endpoint worked instead, and a Duo Workflow outage broke gateway connections mid-event. Entrants who updated a demo link after the deadline were dropped from the gallery and told submissions failing eligibility "cannot be manually added."
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First Session
First Session helps NYC parents find a Medicaid teen therapist by surfacing the highest-leverage contact path first. One email can reach 15 therapists. Fail fast, not by chasing the perfect match.
Mind the Product
Details
What participants said
Novus, the required analytics tool, tripped up many entrants: "Unauthorized" errors on signup, dashboards showing no data, installs stuck on the onboarding wizard. The submission form also rejected Loom links even though the front page allowed them, though the organizer gave one affected entrant a 24-hour link to submit late.
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ClaimGuard
An AI forensic investigator that doesn’t trust its own conclusions and proves every claim against real evidence before reporting it.
SANS Institute
Details
What participants said
Joining the official Slack was a months-long saga: invites were revoked, the workspace demanded a sans.org email, and SSO logins failed until organizer Rob T. Lee finally posted a direct invite link. Lee also warned that nearly 20% of entries had been disqualified last time for missing items like an open-source license, and agreed to relax the 3-minute video limit.
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IncidentCast
Watch four AI specialists investigate the same incident in parallel, converge on one root cause, and back every conclusion with live Splunk MCP queries you can inspect and re-run.
Splunk
Details
What participants said
One entrant filed a formal plagiarism complaint alleging the winning ChangeShield AI reused the architecture of their DharmaGate project published three days earlier; it drew no reply. Earlier, another waited from May 22 for a SAIA activation token with no feedback until Devpost's manager offered to escalate to Splunk.
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TradeCast
Self-improving AI trader: Bull, Bear & Risk agents debate, paper-trade via Alpaca, auto-publish explainer Shorts to YouTube, and rewrite their own prompts by querying Arize Phoenix traces over MCP.
Google Cloud
Details
What participants said
An entrant questioned how the MongoDB track winner could place without a public GitHub repo; Devpost replied that repo and demo links are visible only to judges. At the deadline, a city-wide outage and connectivity failures had several entrants pleading for minutes of extra time, and they were told to email Devpost instead.
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Agentic Sandbox
Spin up competing AI strategy agents that analyze web signals, battle through a live tournament, and recommend the strongest launch direction before you post publicly.
DeveloperWeek
Details
What participants said
Sponsor follow-through was the sore point: Nimble's published contact address drew "not working, probably a fake one," its category winners never appeared in the results, and a name.com challenge winner asking who to contact about the prize got no reply before comments closed. Organizers were present during the build, clarifying that Domain Roulette domains were not assigned, so teams could collide on the same one.
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Git Ressurection
Git Resurrection digs through your GitHub graveyard to find the rare repo worth bringing back to life.
GoTogether.ai & Valiron.co
Details
What participants said
The deadline moved three times on the day, from a published 12:45 to 1:15pm to 1pm, settled seven minutes before the cutoff after an entrant asked which was real; the submission form went up two hours earlier and venue wifi dropped mid-build. Four teams demoed, and the pilot LOIs that were the entire draw stayed undefined until the day and were never announced afterwards.
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AlreadyAsked
Semantic duplicate-post detection for Reddit mods. Catches paraphrased reposts that keyword bots miss, using sentence embeddings plus an LLM verification step to keep false positives low.
Reddit
Details
What participants said
Winners were effusive ("one of the greatest day in my life"; one took leave from work to finish), and a moderator who served as a judge said testing and scoring the apps was "a lot of work, but a lot of fun." A first-time entrant named runner-up called it fun and was grateful to be picked from thousands.
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Eazo
Details
What participants said
Public voting at 50% of the score turned it into what one builder called "a visibility race": early-published projects banked votes before others could submit, LatAm Android users had to sideload an APK to vote at all, and judges "barely seemed involved in evaluating the actual products." Three months on, winners were still chasing prize money that Eazo blamed on an outside CPA's tax review.
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Fan Meaning Map
Discover what kind of Team USA fan you are. Gemini decodes 4 quick answers into your fan archetype, your athlete matches, and the surprising reasons others see sport differently.
Google
Details
What participants said
One entrant publicly walked away over the results, arguing the Hometown Success Engine winner "doesn't even feature hometowns" and that an honorable mention had no public repo, and calling it his last Devpost hackathon. Nobody, organizer or fellow entrant, replied to the thread.
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Memory Moment
Helps caregivers find the right words to say to someone they love with memory loss, in the moment it matters.
Google
Details
What participants said
Results came late (organizers apologized, citing 1,600+ entries and multiple rounds of human review), and one entrant's server logs showed zero inference traffic, meaning their live demo was never run. Winners were still waiting on prize-claim emails nearly three weeks later, and a question about honorable mentions went unanswered, though others said they "had a blast."
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First Impression
See how the same face gets judged completely differently at first glance.
Baidu
Details
What participants said
The 300 starter credits ran out fast ("just understanding and trying out the system can use up all your credit"), and entrants who couldn't edit code freely burned through them even quicker, with no organizer reply. Publishing apps also stalled at 97% or failed on "insufficient credits," and there was no terminal to push code.
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Clinical Decision Room
A virtual tumor board for everyday clinical decisions. Four reasoning frameworks analyze the same patient in parallel, surface where they disagree, and show exactly what would flip the decision.
Darena Health
Details
What participants said
Entrants who missed the Top 28 asked how projects were picked when their demo videos showed no views; the organizer said all 300+ entries were screened, then reviewed the projects himself and told both teams their videos never clearly showed the required Prompt Opinion integration. Other threads chased missing certificates and a dead Discord link.
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Sacrifice Equation
A way to see how different perspectives judge your idea, and what tradeoffs make it succeed.
Zerve
Details
What participants said
Only two winners appeared at announcement, which one entrant called "very suspicious"; manager Zach O'Hagan explained "an issue on the platform side when selecting the winners," named the third that day, and pushed back that first through third had always been stated in the overview. The entrant's reply: "Seem an incompetent hackathon and judges to have this mistake would not join this hackathon again."
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Agent Identity Manager
A control center for AI agent identity. Assign roles, enforce permission boundaries via Auth0 Token Vault, and make every credential exchange and access decision visible in real time.
Okta / Auth0
Details
What participants said
When the deadline extension went out, several entrants found their submissions stuck in draft and unable to finalize, with no organizer reply in the thread. Earlier, Auth0's Fred Patton ran weekly check-ins, conceding there were no SDK docs for Rust or Swift and confirming the brief was open-ended beyond using Token Vault.
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Persona Fork
Take one idea, cook it different ways, and see what people actually like.
Cerebral Valley
Details
What participants said
Vercel's AI SDK v6 shipped breaking changes to its streaming and chat-submission APIs mid-event, and one builder found Google Search grounding silently doing nothing through @ai-sdk/google until he swapped to @google/genai. The three-minute demo, two-minute Q&A format punished interactive projects; one team ran out of time because all three judges had to give input live, prompting the verdict that "hackathons are won on demo strength, not idea strength."
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StoryDeck
StoryDeck helps you build pitch decks and test how they land. It simulates investor and coach feedback so you can fix what’s not convincing before you present.
Airia
Details
What participants said
Entrants kept hitting Airia's monthly agent-execution limit mid-build, and an organizer topped up credits right in the thread ("Just updated"). Publishing agents to the Airia community required an approval that could take three days, so some shared JSON exports instead to make the deadline.
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MeaningMap
Simulates how different audiences interpret your message. AI personas analyze it, score trust and credibility, and reveal where interpretations diverge before you publish.
DigitalOcean
Details
What participants said
The advertised $200 signup credits didn't show up for many entrants, who were then asked for a $50 deposit ("So you want $50 from us to start the hackathon?") before being routed to MLH's Discord to file support tickets. Some got credits after a day's wait; others couldn't get into the Discord at all.
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Room Sense Live
Room Sense Live lets comedians test jokes with a live AI audience that laughs, reacts, and shows how different crowds interpret the same material.
Google
Details
What participants said
Winner notifications slipped past the April 8 date with no organizer word on the forum, and entrants who submitted 30 seconds late got no ruling. After results, one entrant complained the grand-prize demo "does not even have audio" and asked for a full leaderboard; another suspected judges hadn't reviewed every submission, calling some winners "old repeated ideas."
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Decision Room
Practice high-stakes meetings before they happen. Present your case to an AI panel, answer tough questions, and watch how their private deliberation turns into a decision.
Amazon Web Services
Details
What participants said
AWS credit and sandbox requests dragged past the promised 72 hours, leaving entrants "stuck at $0" and unable to call Bedrock, and several hit "not completed registration" errors on Bedrock access until a fellow entrant shared a workaround. Devpost pointed people to the Resources form, and the student-sandbox partner Slalom acknowledged delays.
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Drift Guard
Drift Guard turns every merge request into a lightweight architecture review, detecting structural drift before it becomes technical debt.
GitLab
Details
What participants said
Getting into the GitLab hackathon group was the recurring blocker, with a dozen access-request threads as the deadline neared and a single manager reply saying access was already granted. An entrant whose Flow deployment threw 403 privilege errors was escalated to Discord but never got a fix, and shipped a fallback four days before the deadline.
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Audience Mind Split
An interactive audience simulator that shows how different personas interpret the same line and lets you talk back to them in real time.
Cerebral Valley
Details
What participants said
A two-person team took the $50,000 top prize in a field where "most teams had four," after what the winner called just "five to six hours of nonstop ideation, vibe-coding, testing, iterating" on an entertainment-and-gaming brief. Six of 58 teams reached the final round, and participants' writeups dwell on the judging panel and the pace rather than any tooling trouble.
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Backlash Predictor
A multimodal AI tool that scans campaign materials to simulate audience reactions, surface backlash risks before launch, and suggest targeted rewrites without flattening the creative voice.
DeveloperWeek
Details
What participants said
Organizers answered quick logistics during submissions and then went quiet: an entrant whose connection died mid-upload asking to resubmit, and another asking "what about my place in hackathon will i get any prize or not?", both drew zero replies before comments were closed. Two outside engineers who volunteered as remote judges in the forum were never onboarded either.
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How It Lands
An Elasticsearch-powered multi-agent tool where agents generate and compare interpretations using ES|QL, helping creators explore how their work might be understood before live testing.
Elastic
Details
What participants said
Fresh Elastic Cloud trials sometimes came up without the managed LLM endpoints Agent Builder needs; a manager called it a likely bug and one entrant switched to Serverless to work around it, while another's submitted project broke when a new trial changed model output and got no reply. Winners were announced a few days late with a short apology.
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Cook It
Cook It identifies difficult ingredients or tools in the video and offers tiered substitutions based on the user's reality.
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Learn It
Learn It turns coaching and tutorial videos into guidance that fits your time. Paste a link and get a deep dive, a quick overview, or the one thing that matters right now.
RevenueCat Shipyard: Creator Contest
2 projectsRevenueCat
Details
What participants said
The "shipping container" starter-kit email failed to arrive for many entrants, spawning a 60-reply thread that RevenueCat staff worked through by resending them one by one. Android entrants also couldn't add the official judging address to Google Play internal testing until RevenueCat fixed it about a week later, and several Replit and Rork promo codes didn't work.
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Tiny Crossword
A tiny 5×5 crossword generated by AI using daily or player-chosen themes. Quick to solve, easy to play, and fun to race against puzzles created by the community.
Reddit
Details
What participants said
The winner said Krawlings had "taken over my life" and honorable mentions were thrilled, but one entrant grumbled the winning games "are for children" and doubted anyone would hit the $500K developer-fund thresholds. Three honorable mentions briefly vanished from the announcement post before an admin restored them.
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Play Console
A physical console for orchestrating live AI improv scenes. Shape energy, pacing, and relationships in real time, and jump into the scene yourself without typing prompts.
Logitech
Details
What participants said
India-based entrants waited weeks for the MX Ink hardware, then got FedEx customs bills; Logitech's organizer asked them to pay the duty themselves and promised product as compensation, and one stylus arrived with tampered packaging. Results also slipped, with "judging in progress" still showing after the event ended until winners were set for June 11.
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Snipper
Transforming raw, long-form comedy footage into high-engagement social media content by leveraging the multimodal reasoning of Gemini 3 Flash.
Serverpod
Details
What participants said
One entrant who missed the deadline blamed the stack, "Honestly serverpod deployment process sucks, made whole project but in the end it just all went down the drain," then asked whether deleting his card would stop Serverpod Cloud billing him after the trial. The promised Serverpod and Gemini credits never arrived by email, and entrants answered each other with no organizer in the threads.
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Laugh Spikes
Laugh Spikes treats stand up comedy like sports game tape by aligning audience laughter to transcript lines, visualizing joke impact, and generating data grounded AI feedback to improve a set.
Hex
Details
What participants said
Semantic modeling sat in the judging criteria while nobody could actually create semantic projects, "Multiple participants in discord have asked about Semantic Model access but haven't received a response," and the thread closed without an organizer ever answering. Others were locked out entirely by expired Hex workspace invites.
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Face Race
Face Race is a high-speed interactive game where your facial expressions are the controller! Blink, smile, or raise your eyebrows to dodge obstacles and set a high score.
Snapchat
Details
What participants said
An honorable-mention game passed 44 million views on Snapchat afterwards, an unusually real distribution payoff. Friction was all in Snap's publishing pipeline: one lens finished processing four minutes after the deadline with the Devpost link field already locked, and an entrant whose game ignored mouse clicks on Snapchat web was told to keep the lens stable through judging rather than patch it.
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Room Sense
An AI native performance lab for comedians where you workshop your set in real time with four specialized voice agents powered by Gemini 3 and 2.5.
Google
Details
What participants said
Results landed two months late and set off an uproar: entrants alleged the third-place writeup was a "textbook prompt injection" aimed at judges, second place was hardcoded demo UI, and the grand-prize repo reused code from an earlier hackathon. Devpost's eligibility review upheld the winner and satisfied almost no one.
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Slide Craft
Slide Craft is a high-speed productivity tool that transforms a raw product concept into a professional, high-stakes pitch slide in minutes by prioritizing narrative logic over aesthetics.
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Mark Craft
Mark Craft turns a rough product idea into a usable, professional logo in minutes by focusing on clarity before visuals.
Holiday AI Build-Off
2 projectsFuture/BuilderZ
Details
What participants said
A third-place finisher out of 102 described the format plainly: three hours to build and deploy inside the ReadyMojo sandbox, InsForge for the backend, Claude Code for the build, and a sponsor team that fixed a bug he reported mid-event. His takeaway was about shipping rather than coding, learning "where AI excels and falls through" once deployment is involved.
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Timing Coach
AI coach that teaches natural speech timing in 15 languages through real-time feedback and rhythm visualization, so you sound human, not textbook, across borders.
Visa
Details
What participants said
Received this email: Due to unforeseen circumstances surrounding this hackathon, the Devpost team will unfortunately need to remove it. For any inquiries, please reach out to us at support@devpost.com.
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TinyTips
TinyTips lets creators sell digital content with card or crypto payments, while enforcing instant, on-chain revenue splits in MNEE so collaborators are paid automatically and transparently.
MNEE
Details
What participants said
Getting sandbox MNEE tokens was the main headache: the CLI threw "Insufficient MNEE balance" errors until an entrant posted a faucet-and-bridge workaround, and an organizer then clarified the CLI targets BSV rather than the ERC-20 track being judged. Entrants asking for a Discord or Telegram for updates were pointed back to the website.
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SixView
SixView helps lender teams analyze complex loan agreements from six perspectives, surfacing risks, flexibility, and negotiation hotspots in minutes instead of weeks.
Loan Market Association
Details
What participants said
Entrants asking when finalists would be named got only "if you did not receive an email from Devpost, your project is not a finalist." One entrant called the results suspicious, claiming the Loan Documents winner had no working web app and its link tripped antivirus warnings while more complete entries went unrewarded.
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YesAnd
AI improv partner you can talk to in real time. Practice scenes with natural voice interaction and get instant coaching powered by Gemini. Built with ElevenLabs Conversational AI + Google Cloud.
Google
Details
What participants said
ElevenLabs and Google Cloud credits ran out ("while supplies lasted") and Confluent trials expired before judging began, leaving entrants unsure their projects would still run. One entrant called the results "very disappointing," alleging winners recycled projects from an earlier Google-sponsored hackathon.
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Laughter Discovery
A playful browser app that analyzes your smile response to different GIFs. It runs entirely on your device and reveals what kinds of humor trigger your strongest reactions.
Arm
Details
What participants said
What counted as "on-device" was the whole contest, and Arm's staff drew the line explicitly: a Raspberry Pi qualifies, but not if "the real AI compute work is being done on a backend service," while iPhones and MacBook M4s count for running the Arm instruction set. The first-prize pair note they "did not use an LLM in the end," and an entrant who hit errors clicking submit at the deadline got no reply before comments closed.
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Business Opportunity Finder
Spot high potential businesses for any neighborhood by analyzing local competitors, customer pain points, and unmet demand using Yelp data enhanced with Gemini AI.
Yelp
Details
What participants said
Entrants ran into the 30-day trial expiring and query caps that never reset before judging ended, and a few never got past Yelp's signup captcha. Yelp staff answered nearly every thread and extended trials or raised limits on request, which participants appreciated.
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Punchline Studio
Turn any joke bit into four distinct performances with unique rewrites and emotions. Comics instantly compare delivery, tone, rhythm, and tags to discover the strongest stage version.
LiquidMetal AI
Details
What participants said
Starter-kit credit emails went missing, Raindrop showed a $5 trial instead of the promised $500, the Vultr coupon expired, ElevenLabs codes failed, and deploys errored out. Organizers answered quickly on Devpost while Discord support went quiet, and two Agentic Retail prizes were never awarded.
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Roastify
An AI that roasts your photos and turns them into scroll-stopping, laugh-worthy captions in seconds.
Google Cloud
Details
What participants said
Entrants alleged two winners lacked the required public repo, asked why no judges were listed, and found zero Gemini API calls in their dashboards during judging; Devpost answered that judges "are not required to test the Project." Credit redemption was a recurring headache, though Cloud Run itself drew praise.
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Meme Roaster
Compete with AI in a meme roast challenge. Create your funniest line, and let Reddit decide who delivers the better
Reddit
Details
What participants said
Winners celebrated on r/Devvit, but a deadline extension landed with about 30 minutes' notice, results slipped by days, the Kiro-track winner's servers were down when it was announced, and feedback-award winners had no idea how to claim their prizes.
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Memelab
An AI playground for exploring internet humor by discovering Reddit memes, analyzing what makes them work, and remixing them into new variations.
Cerebral Valley
Details
What participants said
Codex got a careful review: builders liked redirecting it mid-run and its smaller diffs, but found thinking mode burned context fast and the CLI could not take images for UI bugs. One entrant named the "AI Code Velocity trap," many post-event hours spent debugging code she had not written, and argued defensibility is the real problem when a rival is "just a hackathon-vibecoding stint away."
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TrustCue
A simulated Alexa+ experience that detects rising scam risk in conversation and shifts naturally from clarification to protective assistance.
Amazon Web Services
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