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Join the Gemma 4 Challenge: $3,000 prize pool for TEN winners!

Jess Lee on May 06, 2026

May 28 Update: Winner announcement delayed until June 18: read the update here Local AI is having a moment, and we want you to be part of it! ...

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francistrdev profile image
FrancisTRᴅᴇᴠ (っ◔◡◔)っ

This challenge is either a make or break for me! Will probably do both, but we will see.

@jess If you are doing both prompts, would it be appropriate to do in one post or do you prefer to be separate post. I say this because I was thinking about writing about Gemma 4, but also showcase what I built (not going to spoil it yet).

Regardless, hope to see what the community builts/writes :D

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jess profile image
Jess Lee The DEV Team • Edited

Hey @francistrdev! I would keep those as two separate submissions. The content should be different though, please don't just duplicate two posts.

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francistrdev profile image
FrancisTRᴅᴇᴠ (っ◔◡◔)っ

Sounds good! Thanks! I also sent you an email on other stuff! Noticed you might be busy lol. lmk!

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v_rai_7a0813fcee9d16 profile image
Vikassh.

Interesting perspective. Curious how others are handling this.”

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ben profile image
Ben Halpern The DEV Team

This one is going to be great. I’m most excited about the IOT related use cases, but it all seems cool.

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aashitanegii profile image
Aashita

I explored Gemma 4 through the lens of local AI ownership— how moving from cloud-only APIs to capable local models changes the experience for users. One of the most interesting parts for me was intentionally choosing the E4B model instead of defaulting to the largest variant, because accessibility matters just as much as raw capability. Feel free to check out my submission 😇
Excited to read what everyone else is building and writing!

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hemapriya_kanagala profile image
Hemapriya Kanagala

love this, definitely joining in 😄

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fm profile image
Fayaz

This is a yummy challenge!

Hope to see a lot of really useful projects, and at the same time some useless but still cool projects!

Love it 😍
Thanks to Google and the Dev team!

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umarpathan profile image
Umar Pathan

This is a cool challenge. Gemma 4 should lead to some really interesting projects.

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cleverhoods profile image
Gábor Mészáros

Rock & roll

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ggle_in profile image
HARD IN SOFT OUT

I want to.. I need to find something I could do with my potato laptop. it's hot even to compile cpp with 20 lines still waiting for +5 mins.

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ggle_in profile image
HARD IN SOFT OUT

ahh, theres solution <3 thank you google & ollama for the cloud <3 amazing!

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paerrin profile image
Paerrin

Nice! I've already got some good testing with it in my agents memory.

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vivek_shetye profile image
Vivek Shetye

This is exciting. definitely joining this challenge. 🤙

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shogun444 profile image
shogun 444 • Edited

Nice challenge!!
thank you for this amazing oppurtunity!❤️👊🏻

This is my submission : dev.to/shogun444/gemma-4-on-16gb-r...

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oljaas profile image
Oljas Shaiken

Right on time! I am building with it now, super excited for this opportunity. 🥳

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afreen007 profile image
Afreen Hossain

can i download it from ollama?

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_boweii profile image
Tombri Bowei

Yh apparently you can, it's quite big though
ollama.com/library/gemma4/tags

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kkierii profile image
Kerry Kier

Ollama has it available on their cloud platform. I believe yyou get a pretty decent amount on the free plan for gemma. If you run Opwe WebUI or equiv google ai studio has a pretty generous free tier for gemma 4 models.

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sreejit_ profile image
Sreejit Pradhan

Just finished posting about the Gemma 4 family- feel free to go through it.
Now I am on to the next venture, the "Build with Gemma 4" project as it is mentioned over here, and hope it stands out as well. And I also can't wait to go through the projects created by the other builders. The challenge is great. Best of luck everyone.

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alimafana profile image
Ali Afana

Excited for this one. I've been building an AI sales chatbot for Arabic-speaking merchants (Provia), and "intentional model selection" is a criterion I take personally — most multilingual benchmarks barely scratch Arabic generation quality in production contexts.
Planning to submit to the Write track: a head-to-head on Arabic e-commerce conversations, same prompts, same product catalog, controlling for everything except the model. Curious whether 140 languages means fluent or just supported.
Hoping to bring something useful to the community. Good luck everyone 🚀

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kkierii profile image
Kerry Kier

Just published my submission for the Write About Gemma 4 track.

I built an ICS Tabletop Exercise Simulator -- a single Gemma 4 26B MoE model simultaneously simulating six Incident Command System positions so Emergency Operations Managers can run realistic training exercises alone, without coordinating a room full of people.

The write-up covers the architecture, a real token loop issue I hit with extended reasoning on complex multi-constraint prompts (and the fix), an honest look at what happened with RAG retrieval quality, and why the 26B MoE specifically was the right model for this workload.

[dev.to/kkierii/i-used-gemma-4-to-s...]

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francistrdev profile image
FrancisTRᴅᴇᴠ (っ◔◡◔)っ • Edited

Hey @jess @ben @jonmarkgo . I got a quick question on top of this since this is important for the Writing Portion of this challenge.

My post for the writing portion has other people involve. The way it is structured the writing submission is that I talk to @codingwithjiro, @javz, and @konark_13 about their opinion on Gemma 4. They sent me their report and I mention them onto a single post and paraphrasing their experiences. Note that I am the main writer on the submission and they do not have access to edit the submission. They only sent me the report about their Gemma 4 and I am paraphrasing it into a single post. I am crediting them on the post that I worked with them and communicate them about Gemma 4.

I was wondering if this counts as a valid individual submission because of this rule:

DEV does not handle prize-splitting, so in the event that your submission wins, you will need to split the prize amongst yourselves. Thank you for understanding! The Write about Gemma 4 prompt is for individual submissions only.

If I am writing the piece that mentions other people's experience using Gemma 4, would that still count as an "individual submission" or where do you draw the line? Is this fine?

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jess profile image
Jess Lee The DEV Team

That is fine with us as long are your guests are aligned that this is your individual submission.

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tahosin profile image
S M Tahosin

Just submitted my entry. I built a local computer vision pipeline on a Raspberry Pi 5 using Gemma 4's native bounding box output. Replaced my entire YOLO + OpenCV setup with 50 lines of code. The zero-shot detection capability is honestly what sold me on this model, no retraining needed for new object categories. Excited to see what others are building.

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magic-peach profile image
Akanksha Trehun

The model selection framing is what I find most interesting about this challenge. Most AI challenges just say "build something with X" and leave it there, but the emphasis on why you chose the model you did as a judging criterion is a different ask entirely. It pushes you to actually think about the tradeoffs between the E2B, E4B, and the 31B dense not just grab whichever one produces the best demo output.
@ben point about IoT use cases caught my attention too. The fact that the E2B model can run on a Raspberry Pi 5 opens up a genuinely interesting design space local inference at the edge, no cloud dependency, no latency from a round trip. That's a different category of application than most AI challenges enable, and I'm curious to see what people build in that direction.
I'm currently in the middle of GSoC so bandwidth is tight, but the write track feels accessible even with a constrained schedule a comparison piece breaking down when you'd actually reach for each of the three model variants would be genuinely useful to the community and doesn't require spinning up a full project. The OpenRouter free tier being available for the 31B is also a nice touch for people who want to experiment without setting up local hardware first.
One quick clarification question for the team: for the write track, is a post that includes a small working code example and a walkthrough treated as a write submission or does it cross into build territory? Trying to understand where that line sits before I decide on an angle.

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sk_world_help profile image
SK

Thanks for sharing this challenge! I'm interested in participating. Could you clarify:

· What are the judging criteria (e.g., creativity, technical complexity, real-world use)?
· Are there any restrictions on which Gemma 4 model size we can use?
· Is fine-tuning allowed, or only prompt engineering?
· Where should we submit the final project (GitHub + Dev.to post)?

Appreciate the $3K prize pool — excited to build something useful with Gemma 4!

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david_antnio_eb2e63ea741 profile image
David António

Eu gostaria de fazer parte do projeto.

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moonrunnerkc profile image
Brad Kinnard

Submitted for Gemma Build Challenge -

Gemma.Witness: offline, signed evidence capture for field journalists. Audio plus photos go through Gemma 4 locally, out comes a .witness bundle anyone can verify by dragging it into a static HTML page. No server, no network, no trust required.

dev.to/moonrunnerkc/gemmawitness-o...

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sunychoudhary profile image
Suny Choudhary

Interesting challenge.

What I’m curious about is how people evaluate these models beyond demos now.

A lot of projects look impressive in short workflows, but the real separation starts showing up with:

  • long-running tasks
  • tool usage
  • consistency over time
  • retrieval quality
  • failure handling
  • operational reliability

That’s where things usually get much harder.

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prosperincode profile image
Ofentse Nglazi

Can I use Gemma 4 with React Native? Am thinking of building an app with rn-executorch but am not sure it Gemma is supported

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mohamednizzad profile image
Nizzad
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jiashaoshan profile image
jiashaoshan

I've been running Gemma and other small LLMs locally for recent side projects, and the ability to prototype without API rate limits has been a game changer for experimentation. The 4B parameter sweet spot seems to hit the right balance of capability and consumer hardware accessibility. Are participants required to use specific quantization levels, or is there flexibility to optimize for different GPU VRAM constraints?

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alimafana profile image
Ali Afana

Just submitted to the Write category. Tested Gemma 4 26B MoE and 31B Dense against GPT-4o-mini and GPT-4o as the customer-facing reply in my Arabic e-commerce chat router — six real customer scenarios, real catalog.
The surprise wasn't hallucination. Both Gemma variants in Round 1 stalled or hedged instead of fabricating. So I added three Gemma-only rules — Arabic-first frame, temperature 0.3, max_tokens 400. Same intervention, opposite directions: the 26B MoE flipped toward grounded catalog answers; the 31B Dense flipped toward false-negative refusals — "we don't have that" with the answer sitting in its context.
Architecture > size, at least for prompts that need "check first, refuse on absence" sequencing. The a4b suffix on gemma-4-26b-a4b-it ended up mattering more than the parameter count.
dev.to/alimafana/i-added-three-rul...

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sk_world_help profile image
SK

Thanks for sharing this challenge! I'm interested in participating. Could you clarify:

· What are the judging criteria (e.g., creativity, technical complexity, real-world use)?
· Are there any restrictions on which Gemma 4 model size we can use?
· Is fine-tuning allowed, or only prompt engineering?
· Where should we submit the final project (GitHub + Dev.to post)?

Appreciate the $3K prize pool — excited to build something useful with Gemma 4!"

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sharafon profile image
Shan F

It took almost a week of research, reading model cards, reviewing benchmark papers, validating community findings, and refining arguments to complete this article.

Because of the challenge deadline, I decided to publish the current version today. While I'm happy with the analysis, I see this as Version 1 rather than the final word on the topic.

My goal after the competition results are announced is to expand the article further with additional perspectives, deeper experimental evaluations, real-world deployment case studies, multilingual testing insights, and broader comparisons across the open-model ecosystem.

For now, I'm grateful to everyone who takes the time to read, critique, challenge, or contribute ideas. Thoughtful discussion is often more valuable than agreement.

Thank you for being part of the journey.

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coldstartdev profile image
Prakhar Shukla

Just dropped a first-principles breakdown of Gemma 4 — from how Per-Layer Embeddings let a 1.5 GB model do competition mathematics, to exactly which model belongs on which hardware. No fluff, no press release rehash. Would love to know what you think. LINK

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gr_jordanrafael profile image
Gonzalez Rodriguez Jordan Rafael

In this challenge, what are the standards for selecting the 10 winners?
For example, should the project focus more on being useful for users or on having a beautiful design?

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pravdexter profile image
praveen sinha

They have mentioned in the - "Judging Criteria" section.

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davexz001 profile image
Dave Emmanuel Oluwafemi-Adams

Wow, excellent opportunity
Just joined this platform today and I landed here after login in
I havent see this challenge, so Ill just participate

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ggle_in profile image
HARD IN SOFT OUT

.....and im still have no idea what to build or write. -_-_

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samirmishra27 profile image
Samir

Are you supposed to build something with the help of Gemma 4, or actually include AI features like chat which relies on Gemma 4?
Can we build something with the assistance of Gemma 4 but not include any such feature which relies on a LLM?

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samirmishra27 profile image
Samir

@jess Sorry to ping you! I feel I may have mis-understood the requirements.

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the_sandersmanagementgr profile image
The Sanders Management Group

Uploading image
Thanks for the Invitation, Perfect Timing . . .

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daniel_riveraalpzar_861 profile image
Daniel Rivera Alpízar

En cuanto al reto se puede presentar el archivo github para que lo valoren o es lo escribir el articulo y nada más

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timothy_western_ed7594e0a profile image
Timothy Western

Given that I had recently done some quick benchmarking with Gemma 4 on my Lennova Legion Pro. (64 GB of Ram RTX 5080 card with ~16GB VRAM. I decided to take my notes, and turn them into an experience report.

Some of my findings were surprising.

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timothy_western_ed7594e0a profile image
Timothy Western
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aethel_season profile image
AETHEL

This is so great

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harsh2644 profile image
Harsh

Cool 😋

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hilarious_24001 profile image
Hilarious

This is great....
I will definitely be part of these 👌

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we_cheng_3ffaec927575e231 profile image
我們程

Ai 不能太信任

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rizwan_aslambhatti_50784 profile image
Rizwan Aslam Bhatti

Im business started to Pakistan and work former employee rice whole seller delar

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audio_transcriber profile image
Audio_Transcriber_AI

This one is going to be great. I’m e cases, but it all seems cool.🫠

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brucezhang profile image
Bruce Zhang

Looks like a fun challenge 👀
Really curious to see what people build with local multimodal models.

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v_rai_7a0813fcee9d16 profile image
Vikassh.

Interesting perspective. Curious how others are handling this.”

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deestudio028droid profile image
Deepak | DeeStudio

Hii i am deepak !
I am new to this community so can anyone tell me how to register for this Gemma 4 Challenge:

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deestudio028droid profile image
Deepak | DeeStudio

@jess hii I am Deepak and I am 20yrs old i completed my project and submitted... Can you check that my project was submitted correctly for me

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sumybooks2025code profile image
sumybooks-prop

I love this!!

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prachi_kushwaha_ad63adc26 profile image
Prachi Kushwaha

Can I fine tune?

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southy404 profile image
southy404

This will be fun. I'll definitely join!

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kkierii profile image
Kerry Kier

I will say the Gemma api has been getting a lot of errors recently so be careful and don't forget your rate limits.

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prachub profile image
PracHub

Gemma 4's "128K context window" seems interesting, but I'm curious about its real-world scalability challenges. Has anyone tried deploying their 31B parameter dense model on AWS? For those working on the building side, I've been using prachub.com for system design mocks. Their follow-up questions on latency are really similar to what my interviewers have asked. What are you guys planning to build with Gemma 4?

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adriens profile image
adriens

On my way ❤️‍🔥

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pravdexter profile image
praveen sinha • Edited

Excited to submit my entry for the Gemma 4 Challenge!

“GemmaOps Edge” focuses on reasoning over real network signals — not just basic LLM inference — combining alarms, topology, and history to deliver intelligent RCA insights, fully on-device.

Looking forward to exploring other amazing submissions here!

dev.to/pravdexter/gemmaops-edge-fr...

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syakirurahman profile image
Syakir

@jess i just seen this challenge today.

I have been building my new AI saas, narasi.ai since 2 months ago, and gemma 4 (26b & 31) is the backbone of this project.

So, do i qualify to submit this project for this challenge? Its a whole production app (with payment gateway) that is just released yesterday

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sirayuki profile image
Terry

Great!

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motlalepule_mittah_c34089 profile image
bk blessing

uhh

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prasadt1 profile image
PRASAD TILLOO

Just submitted to Build With Gemma 4: L.E.N.S. — a voice-first photography coach for blind and low-vision artisans listing handmade work online.

The maker can't verify the photo the way they verify the craft by touch. Gemma 4 E4B (Ollama, local) reads the actual product image and returns structured JSON → one spoken fix → compare two shots → copy-ready listing text.

I picked E4B on purpose: multimodal enough to trust, small enough to run offline on a maker's laptop — privacy isn't a feature here, it's the independence mechanism.

No-install demo + walkthrough in the post. Would love feedback if you try it.

Post: dev.to/prasadt1/lens-a-private-pho...

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motedb profile image
mote

The GIL release on I/O is the part most people miss. Your threading example hitting the same speed as single-threaded is the classic tell — 8 threads all fighting over one lock while the actual work (parsing, dict lookups, string ops) is pure bytecode.

The real question nobody asks: for your markdown parsing workload, would multiprocessing with shared memory have been faster than threads? The pickle serialization cost on a few hundred thousand small objects can eat the gains, but if you're just pushing text through a pipeline, ProcessPoolExecutor sometimes beats ThreadPoolExecutor by 2-3x on CPython.

Also: did you try PyPy? The JIT can eliminate some of the GIL pressure for tight loops, though the warmup time hurts one-off scripts.

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motedb profile image
mote

The "errors are values" philosophy is clean in theory but the wrapping chains get brutal in real codebases. Your Pattern 4 (sentinel errors) is where most Go teams I've seen eventually land — fmt.Errorf with %w is fine until you have 5 layers of wraps and errors.Is starts feeling like instanceof hell.

The Rust comparison at the end is fair. What Go's error model actually wins on is readability at the call site — you can see exactly what can go wrong without jumping to a type definition. Rust's ? operator is more ergonomic but it hides the error path unless you're reading carefully.

One thing this piece doesn't cover: error context in concurrent code. When 10 goroutines return wrapped errors, how do you reconstruct which request caused which failure? multierror or errgroup.Group? That's where Go's model gets messy fast.

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motedb profile image
mote

The offline constraint forces you to think about where the "AI layer" actually adds value vs where it's just cargo-culted in. For code completion, sure — local models are fine. But for reasoning-heavy tasks like code review or architecture decisions, the latency and capability gap between local and frontier models matters more than people admit.

One thing worth noting on the security angle: air-gapped means you also lose model updates, CVE patches for the inference stack, and any telemetry that catches model-level vulnerabilities. The tradeoffs aren't just about capability.

Curious what your context window strategy is with the 8B model — do you split long files into chunks manually, or does the tooling handle it? That's usually where local setups break down for real engineering work.

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motedb profile image
mote

The Bedrock AgentCore config-driven approach is the right abstraction for this use case. YAML-driven agent definitions map cleanly to state machines, and the "deploy from config" model is how most agent frameworks should have started instead of requiring code for everything.

The "roll your own" vs OpenClaw tradeoff is real though — OpenClaw handles the local execution, event loop, and persistence that sounds trivial until you're building it yourself. Storage, scheduling, error recovery, memory management... the 20% that takes 80% of the effort.

For the "control it" requirement — what does that look like in practice? For edge deployments (robotics, IoT), you'd want the agent's memory to survive restarts without losing context. Do you persist the conversation history between scheduled runs, or does it reset each cycle?

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adriens profile image
adriens
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no_name_reporter profile image
Cassie Putnam • Edited

I am definitely getting in on this. Not even "in it to win it". I just can't wait to see all the great things people come up with.

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siddheshgupta profile image
Siddhesh Gupta

What stood out to me was how much time QA teams actually spend maintaining locators instead of writing tests. The comparison between traditional Appium Inspector workflows and Vision AI-based testing was explained really well. I also liked that the blog didn’t completely dismiss Appium Inspector and clearly showed where it is still useful. Interesting read on how mobile automation is evolving beyond heavy XPath dependency.

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whelan_pereira_4599cc519c profile image
Whelan Pereira • Edited

Super excited for this challenge! 🚀 The Gemma 4 model family looks incredibly versatile especially love that the 2B/4B models can run on edge devices like Raspberry Pi and Pixel phones. Local AI is definitely the future. Free

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jeevan_bandi_3c3cede6bc0f profile image
Jeevan Bandi

Building with Gemma has been a game-changer for lightweight AI apps. Excited to be part of the #gemmachallenge! What do you all think of the implementation?

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davexz001 profile image
Dave Emmanuel Oluwafemi-Adams

I didn`t see the Gemma 4 Submission Template when I clicked the first link

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raslanove profile image
raslanove

Here's my submission:
dev.to/raslanove/insults-cutlasses...

Thank you for this opportunity!

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samirmishra27 profile image
Samir

Submitted my entry ✨
dev.to/samirmishra27/i-built-proof...

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brendanddev profile image
Brendan

Happy to take part in this amazing opportunity!

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https_gabe profile image
Gabriel

I'd love to rank up on this tournament

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favour_akinwumi_d27fa4cd3 profile image
Favour Akinwumi

Interesting perspective. Curious how others are handling this.”

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olivia_jack_56eb10caad79b profile image
Olivia Jack

I love what is cooking here

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hernol profile image
hernol

I was actually making a game, does it count?

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mampato787 profile image
mampato787

¿que es gemma4?