DEV Community: Jem

Congrats to the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 3: Slow and Steady Winners!

Jem — Fri, 30 Oct 2026 20:35:58 +0000

The results are in for Week 3 of our five Hacktoberfest DEV Challenges! For Slow and Steady, we asked you to channel your inner sloth and build something with open-weight models or open-source AI that rewards laziness.

The builds we saw were anything but lazy. Many of you showed exactly why open innovation matters for this kind of work: automations that run offline, keep personal messages and files on your own machine, and cost nothing to keep running once they're set up.

Thank you to everyone who built with us this week. Now, let's celebrate our winners!

🎉 Congratulations To…

Overall Winner

Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 3: Slow and Steady 🦥

Hotragn Pettugani

Oct 26

The laziest way to pick a 2027 health plan beat my model (82% vs 79%). So I built Second Look to tell you when lazy is safe

#devchallenge #hf26challenge #gemma #opensource

12 min read

Featured Category Winners

Best Use of Render

Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 3: Slow and Steady 🦥

Aina Zulfiqar

Oct 24

AccessPath: Clearer Forms, One Question at a Time

#devchallenge #hf26challenge #ai

7 min read

Best Use of TabPFN

Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 3: Slow and Steady 🦥

Elias Shieh

Oct 22

My alarm won't let me snooze if I'd be late

#devchallenge #hf26challenge #machinelearning #opensource

7 min read

Best Use of Tinker

Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 3: Slow and Steady Submission 🦥

Advik Divekar

Oct 25

A small, not-so-smart model went from 10% to 99.6% at reading property deeds for $1.15, and it says 'check this line' instead of bluffing

#tinker #hf26challenge #devchallenge #hacktoberfest

12 min read

Best Use of Arduino

Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 3: Slow and Steady Submission 🦥

Muhammad Murtuza Hussain

Oct 26

I sleep 4 hours a night because of email, so I built a sloth that reads it for me (Gemma 4 on an Arduino UNO Q)

#devchallenge #hf26challenge #gemma #arduino

9 min read

Best Use of DigitalOcean

Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 3: Slow and Steady Submission 🦥

Nikitha Kishore Avadootha

Oct 26

Every group chat has one person who plans everything. I built an app so nobody has to be that person.

#devchallenge #hf26challenge

7 min read

Best Use of Gemma

Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 3: Slow and Steady Submission 🦥

Samarth Kumble

Oct 24

I get 50 placement emails a week. A local Gemma now tells me which 4 I can apply to.

#devchallenge #hf26challenge #ai #opensource

6 min read

Partner Category Winners

Best Use of Auth0 for AI Agents

Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 3: Slow and Steady Submission 🦥

Aridio Silva

Oct 25

SlothGuard - a lazy access reviewer that asks your phone before it revokes anything

#devchallenge #hf26challenge

13 min read

Best Use of Backboard

Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 3: Slow and Steady Submission 🦥

Jennifer Evangelista

Oct 24

Night Guard: an open-model guard that watches out for kids in game chats, so tired parents don't have to read every message

#devchallenge #hf26challenge #ai #opensource

16 min read

Best Use of Browserbase

Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 3: Slow and Steady Submission 🦥

Aarish mansur

Oct 22

My college ERP keeps logging me out. Sloth Clerk checks my 75% attendance at 7:30 AM and asks my phone before it clicks Submit

#devchallenge #hf26challenge

9 min read

Best Use of ElevenLabs

Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 3: Slow and Steady Submission 🦥

Nikema

Oct 26

Talk to the Book: dictating the book I owe 57 people

#devchallenge #hf26challenge

5 min read

Best Use of Entire

Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 3: Slow and Steady Submission 🦥

Melwin Siril Joel V

Oct 21

I let a 25 MB model choose the typeface for my quote cards. It got it wrong.

#hf26challenge #devchallenge #opensource #javascript

9 min read

Best Use of GitHub Copilot

Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 3: Slow and Steady Submission 🦥

Dhruv Jani

Oct 21

I Built slothd: A Local-First, Offline-Capable AI Daemon That Patiently Organizes Your Messy Workspace

#devchallenge #hf26challenge #opensource #gemma

104

14 min read

Best Use of Mastra

Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 3: Slow and Steady Submission 🦥

daniel

Oct 23

I gave up naming my projects. My agents do it now.

#devchallenge #hf26challenge #mastra #agents

7 min read

Best Use of MongoDB Atlas

Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 3: Slow and Steady Submission 🦥

dipak agrahari

Oct 23

The answer was already in another thread, so I built ThreadSherpa

#devchallenge #hf26challenge #ai #opensource

8 min read

Best Use of Sentry Agent Tracing

Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 3: Slow and Steady Submission 🦥

Jose Antonio Granero

Oct 24

Fridge Sloth 🦥: snap your fridge, get a grocery list and healthy meals, fully offline on Gemma

#devchallenge #hf26challenge #ai #opensource

8 min read

Best Use of SerpApi

Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 3: Slow and Steady Submission 🦥

chamod dhananjaya

Oct 22

I Need Money for My Studies, So I Built an Agent That Hunts for It While I Sleep

#devchallenge #hf26challenge

4 min read

Best Use of Temporal

Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 3: Slow and Steady Submission 🦥

Kavya Sharma

Oct 25

Slothshot: a tiny model on a slow laptop names my screenshots overnight, and Temporal makes sure it finishes

#devchallenge #hf26challenge #temporal #opensource

10 min read

Best Use of Tiger Data

Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 3: Slow and Steady Submission 🦥

Victory Lucky

Oct 26

Too lazy to read my newsletters, so I built an AI that reads them to me

#devchallenge #hf26challenge #ai #opensource

12 min read

Best Use of Ultramarine

Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 3: Slow and Steady Submission 🦥

Himanshu Kumar

Oct 24

“Bas do minute ka kaam hai”: I built VOX so 24 support tickets stop keeping me up

#devchallenge #hf26challenge

12 min read

Best Use of a .tech Domain

Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 3: Slow and Steady Submission 🦥

Niraj Khetre

Oct 24

Black October hit PHP, npm and PyPI. So I built a system that catches it in my app before I ship, with the fix ready

#devchallenge #hf26challenge #security #gemma

15 min read

Prizes

Overall winner: $250 USD, a DEV++ membership, and an exclusive DEV badge
Featured category winners: $200 USD and an exclusive DEV badge each
Partner category winners: $100 USD and an exclusive DEV badge each

All participants with a valid submission will receive a completion badge.

A huge thank you to our partners for making these prizes possible!

What's Next?

There's still time to join our final Hacktoberfest challenge! Week 4 runs through October 31: build something spooky, or honor the past in the spirit of Día de los Muertos, using open-weight models or open-source AI.

Jem for The DEV Team

Oct 26

Join the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge: Ghost in the Machine! $2,850 in Prizes Across 21 Winners.

#devchallenge #hf26challenge #hacktoberfest #ai

105

7 min read

You can find all five challenges on the HF26 DEV Challenge Hub.

Happy Hacktoberfest! 🦥

Join the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge: Ghost in the Machine! $2,850 in Prizes Across 21 Winners.

Jem — Mon, 26 Oct 2026 19:00:30 +0000

Week 4 of our Hacktoberfest DEV Challenges starts today, and it's our final challenge of the series! Running through October 31, the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge: Week 4 gives you the week to build, wrapping up on Halloween night just as Día de los Muertos begins. 🎃🌼

This year's Hacktoberfest is all about building brand-new projects with open-source AI and open-weight models. Here's everything you need to know about Hacktoberfest 2026.

Missed Week 3: Slow and Steady? No problem. Every challenge is a fresh start, so you're competing on the same footing as everyone else.

This week, we'll select one overall winner and a winner in each of our 20 partner categories. See all the challenges and current partner categories on the HF26 DEV Challenge Hub.

Let's get to it! 👻

This week's theme: Ghost in the Machine

Build something spooky, or something that honors the past in the spirit of Día de los Muertos, with open-weight models or open-source AI.

This week brings us Halloween on October 31 and Día de los Muertos on November 1 and 2, a stretch of the calendar when the line between past and present feels a little thinner. Whether that brings to mind things that go bump in the night, ofrendas glowing with candlelight and marigolds, or the memories and stories we carry with us, we want to see what it inspires you to build. The theme is intentionally broad, so interpret it however you'd like!

That can mean running an open-weight model, building on an open-source agent harness or framework, running inference locally, or all three. Whatever you pick, the open pieces should be what makes your project work.

A few ideas to get you going:

A haunted terminal that "possesses" your shell and whispers back eerie commentary on the commands you run
A virtual ofrenda builder that helps you write a remembrance for a loved one and gather their favorite foods, songs, and stories
An offline séance chatbot that channels the spirit of a long-dead programming language
A local oral history tool that records and transcribes family stories so they're never lost
A ghost story generator that weaves your smart home's sensor logs into a creepy tale of what happened while you were asleep
A project that brings an abandoned open-source tool or a forgotten corner of internet history back to life

In your post, tell us why open innovation matters for what you built. Does running your own model mean your project works with the lights (and the internet) off? Keep your family's photos and stories private and on your own machine? Make sure what you build isn't locked inside a service that might disappear someday? Tell us where your open-based approach worked better than a closed one.

Ghost in the Machine Submission Template

Prize Categories

Alongside our overall winner, we have 20 prize categories for projects that use a specific partner's technology. You don't need to use any of these to win the overall prize, but if you've been curious about any of this tech, this is a great excuse to give one a try. Full descriptions are on the hub.

Featured categories:

Partner categories:

Best Use of Auth0 for AI Agents
Best Use of Backboard
Best Use of Browserbase
Best Use of ElevenLabs
Best Use of Entire
Best Use of GitHub Copilot
Best Use of Mastra
Best Use of MongoDB Atlas
Best Use of Sentry Agent Tracing
Best Use of SerpApi
Best Use of Temporal
Best Use of Tiger Data
Best Use of Ultramarine (Paper Instruments)
Best Use of a .tech Domain

Pro Tip: Partner category winners come from a smaller pool of submissions, so your odds are meaningfully higher.

Note: One project can enter every category it genuinely uses, but you can only win once per challenge, and we'll aim to celebrate as many different builders as possible across the month.

Free credits: several partners are giving participants credits and promo codes. Claim yours at hacktoberfest.com/my.

A huge thank you to our partners for making these prizes possible!

Judging Criteria

This is DEV, so your write-up matters most.

Writing Quality (weighted most heavily): Is the post clear and engaging? Does it explain what you built, who it's for, and why open innovation matters?
Relevance to the Prompt and Theme: Is open-source AI or open-weight models at the core of the project? Does it capture the spirit of the theme in a thoughtful way?
Creativity: Is it an original idea, or a fresh take on a familiar problem?
Technical Execution: Does it work, and is it well built?
Use of Partner Technology (optional): If you're entering a partner category, does the project use that technology in a meaningful way?

Show your work. We'd love to see how you built it. Save your agent session with DevRelay and embed it in your post, or link to it. It's optional, but it helps the judges understand your process.

Prizes

Overall winner (1): $250 USD, a DEV++ membership, and an exclusive DEV badge
Featured category winners (6): $200 USD and an exclusive DEV badge each
Partner category winners (14): $100 USD and an exclusive DEV badge each

All participants with a valid submission will receive a completion badge.

How To Participate

Publish a post on DEV using the submission template above. Tell us what you built and how you interpreted the theme, show us a demo, and explain why open innovation matters for what you built. If you can show us the moment your project landed, whether it gave someone chills or brought back a memory, even better!

Please review our judging criteria, rules, guidelines, and FAQ page before submitting so you understand our participation guidelines and official contest rules, such as eligibility requirements.

Need Help?

New to Hacktoberfest this year? Start with Everything You Need To Know About Hacktoberfest 2026.
Come hang out and ask questions in the MLH Discord.
The challenge landing page has resources from our partners to help you get started.

Important Dates

October 26: Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge: Week 4 begins!
October 31: Submissions due at 11:59 PM PDT 🎃
November 1 - 2: Día de los Muertos 🌼
Week of November 2: Winners announced

Thank You for an Amazing Hacktoberfest

This is the last challenge of our Hacktoberfest series, and we've loved seeing everything you've built with open-source AI this month. Thank you to every participant, partner, and community member who showed up week after week. Let's make this final week one to remember!

Questions about the challenge? Drop them in the comments below.

Happy Hacktoberfest, and good luck! 👻🌼

Congrats to the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 2: Side Hustle Winners!

Jem — Fri, 23 Oct 2026 20:18:31 +0000

We're excited to announce the winners of the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 2: Side Hustle!

This week, we asked you to build something with open-weight models or open-source AI that someone would actually pay for. You delivered small, specific, useful tools for freelancers, small businesses, job seekers, and niche communities, and plenty of you went the extra mile to put your project in front of a real first user. We loved seeing how often running open models was what made the business work, whether that meant keeping costs low, keeping customer data private, or tuning for a niche that general-purpose APIs miss.

Thank you to everyone who participated. Now, let's celebrate our winners!

🎉 Congratulations To…

Overall Winner

Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 2: Side Hustle Submission 💸

Muhammad Murtuza Hussain

Oct 18

Job hunting became my side hustle, so I built Deis (Gemma 4) Tinder for jobs: swipe right, Gemma tailors your CV

#devchallenge #hf26challenge #gemma #opensource

14 min read

Featured Category Winners

Best Use of Render

Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 2: Side Hustle Submission 💸

Abeera Lodhi

Oct 18

Contains: I built an allergen checker for home bakers that says “I’m not sure” instead of guessing

#devchallenge #hf26challenge #ai #machinelearning

16 min read

Best Use of TabPFN

Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 2: Side Hustle Submission 💸

Ibrahim Awab

Oct 14

pricecheck: my friend didn't know what to offer for a used monitor, so now he gets three numbers

#devchallenge #hf26challenge #ai #opensource

11 min read

Best Use of Tinker

Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 2: Side Hustle Submission 💸

Heet Ranpura

Oct 18

I stopped asking AI to count. Now it catches 95.6% of the mistakes in crochet patterns, on a laptop

#devchallenge #ai #hf26challenge #opensource

16 min read

Best Use of Arduino

Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 2: Side Hustle Submission 💸

k66 (Lana Chen)

Oct 18

LLMs Have No Nose, So We Built One: an AI Nose on the Arduino UNO Q

#devchallenge #hf26challenge

9 min read

Best Use of DigitalOcean

Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 2: Side Hustle Submission 💸

Reet Singh

Oct 18

“Simple site hai, 15k mein ho jayega na?” I built Panga so freelancers stop saying yes too fast

#devchallenge #hf26challenge #opensource #ai

17 min read

Best Use of Gemma

Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 2: Side Hustle Submission 💸

Rohit Purkait

Oct 18

'Kal' means yesterday and tomorrow. I built home bakers a WhatsApp order sheet that never guesses which.

#devchallenge #hf26challenge #ai #opensource

10 min read

Partner Category Winners

Best Use of Backboard

Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 2: Side Hustle Submission 💸

Anish Kumar

Oct 17

ReplyDesk: a 4B model that answers Google reviews and stops promising refunds it can't give

#devchallenge #hf26challenge #ai #opensource

11 min read

Best Use of ElevenLabs

Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 2: Side Hustle Submission 💸

Priyanshu Purohit

Oct 18

Auditly: the shopkeeper talks, the ledger writes itself

#devchallenge #hf26challenge #ai #opensource

8 min read

Best Use of Entire

Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 2: Side Hustle Submission 💸

Aun Raza

Oct 19

NetCortex

#devchallenge #hf26challenge

8 min read

Best Use of GitHub Copilot

Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 2: Side Hustle Submission 💸

Vinmay Nair

Oct 17

ClearToList: Is that thrift find recalled? A photo check against CPSC recalls with Gemma 4

#devchallenge #hf26challenge #ai #opensource

9 min read

Best Use of Mastra

Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 2: Side Hustle Submission 💸

Ansh Varshney

Oct 18

ParcelProof: the customer's voice note says the box was empty. Gemma checks it against the receipts, then reads you the case.

#devchallenge #hf26challenge #ai #opensource

8 min read

Best Use of MongoDB Atlas

Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 2: Side Hustle Submission 💸

Taminoturoko Briggs

Oct 18

DocScout: find open-source API docs you can contribute to, picked by Gemma

#devchallenge #hf26challenge

6 min read

Best Use of Sentry Agent Tracing

Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 2: Side Hustle Submission 💸

Bipul Chamoli

Oct 16

"red label adha kg 2 box": an offline WhatsApp order reader for Indian shops that asks before it guesses

#ai #devchallenge #hf26challenge #opensource

9 min read

Best Use of SerpApi

Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 2: Side Hustle Submission 💸

Subarna Maity

Oct 17

We Searched eBay for 237 Recalled Products. Only 45 of 12,562 Listings Named the Model.

#devchallenge #hf26challenge #ai #opensource

20 min read

Best Use of a .tech Domain

Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 2: Side Hustle Submission 💸

Antonia Herrera

Oct 18

My beautician can't answer the phone when her hands full, so I built her a Gemma 4 receptionist

#devchallenge #hf26challenge #ai #opensource

15 min read

Best Use of Temporal

Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 2: Side Hustle Submission 💸

Bowen Rui

Oct 15

chaptermill: a podcast's back catalog to show notes for 3¢ an audio hour, on an old PC I kept crashing on purpose

#devchallenge #hf26challenge #temporal #opensource

9 min read

Best Use of Tiger Data

Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 2: Side Hustle Submission 💸

Kartik Agnihotri

Oct 18

Perforvisor: a 5★ review said "Needs to be more clean." Open models caught it.

#hf26challenge #devchallenge #opensource #ai

10 min read

Prizes

Overall winner: $250 USD, a DEV++ membership, and an exclusive DEV badge
Featured category winners: $200 USD and an exclusive DEV badge each
Partner category winners: $100 USD and an exclusive DEV badge each

All participants with a valid submission will receive a completion badge.

A huge thank you to our partners for making these prizes possible!

What's Next?

Hacktoberfest isn't over yet! Week 3: Slow and Steady is live right now, with $2,850 in prizes across 21 winners. There's still time to jump in:

Jem for The DEV Team

Oct 19

Join the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge: Slow and Steady! $2,850 in Prizes Across 21 Winners.

#devchallenge #hf26challenge #hacktoberfest #productivity

154

7 min read

Week 4 kicks off Monday, October 26. Sign up now so you don't miss the theme reveal:

The Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge: Week 4 runs October 26 to October 31. Build something spooky, or something that honors the past in the spirit of Día de los Muertos, with open-weight models or open-source AI. $2,850 in prizes across 21 winners. This is the final challenge of our Hacktoberfest series. This year's Hacktoberfest is all about building brand-new projects with open-source AI and open-weight models, and the theme is intentionally broad, so interpret it however you'd like!

Signed Up Sign Up Sign Up

Happy Hacktoberfest, and congrats again to all of our winners! 🎃

Congrats to the Sanity Challenge Winners!

Jem — Thu, 22 Oct 2026 15:53:41 +0000

We are thrilled to announce the winners of the Sanity Challenge, our partnership with Sanity built around a single idea: an agent is only as good as the content behind it.

Two paths were open. Path one asked you to ship an agent backed by a Sanity Context Knowledge Base, with a bar we set deliberately high: if a keyword search would have gotten the same answer, aim higher. Path two asked you to vibe-code something strange and tell us the truth about how it went.

Narrowing this field down was tough. We saw an agent that knows Romania rewrote its vignette rules this week, and will tell you in four languages, an etiquette guide that refuses to store a verdict and works out whether something is rude from what locals and travelers actually say, and more than a few projects that measured themselves against keyword search and published the rounds they lost. Many of you wrote down every wrong turn instead of just the clean ones, which made reviewing your builds a blast.

Thank you to everyone who participated. Now, let's celebrate our winners!

🎉 Congratulations To…

Path One Winners: Ship an agent that queries real content

Sanity Challenge Path One Submission

Kateryna Ivashchenko

Oct 4

Clockwrit — every hour has a citation (an agent that knows what time it is, legally)

#devchallenge #sanitychallenge #sanity #ai

7 min read

@rayyer built an agent that answers what the clock and the calendar legally say at a given place and moment, and on whose authority, reading the law, the IANA time zone database and the runtime's own clock side by side. Pending legislation is modeled as Sanity Content Releases, so you can ask what the answer would be if a bill passed, and when two sources disagree the agent drafts a ruling that a person signs before it becomes a standing instruction for every future build. On 30 held-out questions Clockwrit scored 30/30, against 22/30 for the same model with no tools and 16/30 for keyword search over the same sources.

Sanity Challenge Path One Submission

Daniel Nwaneri

Oct 1

10 Internal Inconsistencies in 3 Published Groundwater Surveys

#devchallenge #sanitychallenge #sanity #ai

12 min read

@dannwaneri studied geophysics at university and built an agent for the problem he was trained to work on: whether a groundwater resistivity reading at a Niger Delta site is normal, anomalous, or uncertain, grounded in three published survey papers. Numbers come only from GROQ queries and explanations only from the Knowledge Base, and because survey sites in the Niger Delta often have no network, an offline mode drops the model entirely and still returns the verdict from the structured data. While building it, he found internal inconsistencies inside those three papers, checked each one against the source PDFs, and contacted the corresponding authors.

Sanity Challenge Path One Submission

Idolor Godswill Eseteru

Oct 4

Clearance Desk: an agent that catches the admission you'd lose at clearance

#devchallenge #sanitychallenge #sanity #ai

9 min read

@big14way built Clearance Desk for a problem with a one-year cost: in Nigeria you can be offered admission and still be turned away at clearance over a single wrong subject. It checks a candidate's UTME subjects, score and O'level sittings against the published 2026/2027 requirements at five universities and returns Eligible, At risk, or Not eligible with every source linked, on the design rule that the model finds and explains while deterministic code judges. His eval answered our own question directly: the same model with keyword search over the same Knowledge Base read the right entry, quoted the right rule, and still told an ineligible candidate she was fine.

Path Two Winners: Vibe-code something strange

Sanity Challenge Path Two Submission

Faris

Oct 4

Pothole Adoption Agency

#devchallenge #sanitychallenge #sanity #ai

12 min read

@faris-khan turned 2,512 real NYC 311 pothole complaints from one Queens community board into a pet adoption shelter where every fate follows the city's own record. The gaps in the data became the characters: 62% of complaints have no coordinates, so they are the lost strays, listed by street rather than placed on a map that would have to be invented. Three Workflows definitions run the lifecycle and a custom App SDK app handles moderation. The build writeup is an honest one, covering the document cap migration, the duplicate workflow instances, and the moment the agent reported that nothing had been written when something had.

Sanity Challenge Path Two Submission

Ken W Alger

Sep 30

A wine cellar that remembers what you used to believe

#sanitychallenge #devchallenge #ai #sanity

20 min read

@kenwalger built a virtual wine cellar that answers a harder question than "what do I have right now," storing events and dated claims rather than current state so you can ask what the collection looked like in 1999, or what you believed a bottle's drinking window was in 2018. The build writeup is a study in making verification hard to fake, with gates that name what does not count as proof and oracles the model was explicitly told not to repair. Then a reader found a flaw in the design after publication, and rather than quietly patch it, Ken added an addendum explaining the catch and recorded it as an architecture decision record.

Prizes

All five winners will receive:

$500 USD cash prize
DEV++ Membership
Exclusive DEV Badge

All participants with a valid submission will receive a completion badge on their DEV profile.

What's Next?

Week 3 of the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge is live and the theme is Slow and Steady. Check out the full details and join today:

Jem for The DEV Team

Oct 19

Join the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge: Slow and Steady! $2,850 in Prizes Across 21 Winners.

#devchallenge #hf26challenge #hacktoberfest #productivity

154

7 min read

Week 4 of the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge launches on October 26. Register now so you don't miss the theme reveal:

Signed Up Sign Up Sign Up

Thank you to Sanity for partnering with us on this one, and congratulations again to our winners 💜

Join the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge: Slow and Steady! $2,850 in Prizes Across 21 Winners.

Jem — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 20:07:12 +0000

Winners announced!

Highlights winning offline AI laziness tools

Jem for The DEV Team

Oct 30

Congrats to the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 3: Slow and Steady Winners!

#devchallenge #hf26challenge #hacktoberfest #productivity

4 min read

Week 3 of our five Hacktoberfest DEV Challenges starts today! Running through October 25, the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge: Week 3 gives you a full week to build.

This year's Hacktoberfest is all about building brand-new projects with open-source AI and open-weight models. Here's everything you need to know about Hacktoberfest 2026.

Missed Week 2: Side Hustle? No problem. Every challenge is a fresh start, so you're competing on the same footing as everyone else.

This week, we'll select one overall winner and a winner in each of our 20 partner categories. See all five challenges and current partner categories on the HF26 DEV Challenge Hub.

Let's get to it (slowly)! 🦥

This week's theme: Slow and Steady

Build something with open-weight models or open-source AI that rewards laziness.

Tomorrow, October 20, is International Sloth Day, and we think sloths have it figured out. They move at their own pace, conserve their energy, and even help moderate our website. This week, we want you to channel your inner sloth and build something that does the work so you don't have to.

Your build could help someone relax, automate a task they dread, or just make life a little easier. A few ideas to get you going:

A local agent that reads your group chats overnight and hands you a two-line summary in the morning
A wind-down companion that generates a calming bedtime story or ambient soundscape, running entirely offline
A fridge photo to grocery list tool, so you never have to stand there with the door open again
A file and inbox tidier that automatically sorts, renames, and archives the clutter you keep putting off

In your post, tell us why open innovation matters for what you built. Does running your own model mean your automation works without an internet connection? Keep your personal messages and files on your own machine? Let you set it up once and never pay for it again? Tell us where your open-based approach worked better than a closed one.

Slow and Steady Submission Template

Prize Categories

Featured categories:

Partner categories:

Best Use of Auth0 for AI Agents 🆕
Best Use of Backboard
Best Use of Browserbase 🆕
Best Use of ElevenLabs
Best Use of Entire
Best Use of GitHub Copilot
Best Use of Mastra
Best Use of MongoDB Atlas
Best Use of Sentry Agent Tracing
Best Use of SerpApi
Best Use of Temporal
Best Use of Tiger Data
Best Use of Ultramarine (Paper Instruments) 🆕
Best Use of a .tech Domain

Pro Tip: Partner category winners come from a smaller pool of submissions, so your odds are meaningfully higher.

Note: One project can enter every category it genuinely uses, but you can only win once per challenge, and we'll aim to celebrate as many different builders as possible across the month.

Free credits: several partners are giving participants credits and promo codes. Claim yours at hacktoberfest.com/my.

A huge thank you to our partners for making these prizes possible!

Judging Criteria

This is DEV, so your write-up matters most.

Writing Quality (weighted most heavily): Is the post clear and engaging? Does it explain what you built, who it's for, and why open innovation matters?
Relevance to the Prompt and Theme: Is open-source AI or open-weight models at the core of the project? Does it genuinely save effort, help someone relax, or make life easier?
Creativity: Is it an original idea, or a fresh take on a familiar problem?
Technical Execution: Does it work, and is it well built?
Use of Partner Technology (optional): If you're entering a partner category, does the project use that technology in a meaningful way?

Show your work. We'd love to see how you built it. Save your agent session with DevRelay and embed it in your post, or link to it. It's optional, but it helps the judges understand your process.

Prizes

Overall winner (1): $250 USD, a DEV++ membership, and an exclusive DEV badge
Featured category winners (6): $200 USD and an exclusive DEV badge each
Partner category winners (14): $100 USD and an exclusive DEV badge each

All participants with a valid submission will receive a completion badge.

How To Participate

Publish a post on DEV using the submission template above. Tell us what you built and what effort it saves, show us a demo, and explain why open innovation matters for what you built. If you can show us how much time or effort your project saves, even better!

Please review our judging criteria, rules, guidelines, and FAQ page before submitting so you understand our participation guidelines and official contest rules, such as eligibility requirements.

Need Help?

New to Hacktoberfest this year? Start with Everything You Need To Know About Hacktoberfest 2026.
Come hang out and ask questions in the MLH Discord.
The challenge page has resources from our partners to help you get started.

Important Dates

October 19: Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge: Week 3 begins!
October 20: International Sloth Day 🦥
October 25: Submissions due at 11:59 PM PDT
Week of October 26: Winners announced

Looking Ahead

Week 4, our final Hacktoberfest challenge, launches Monday, October 26 with a brand-new theme. Be sure to register so you don't miss the announcement.

Signed Up Sign Up Sign Up

Questions about the challenge? Drop them in the comments below.

Take it slow, happy Hacktoberfest, and good luck!

Congrats to the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge: Touch Grass Winners!

Jem — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 17:38:26 +0000

We are so excited to announce the winners of the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge: Touch Grass!

It was another week of record-breaking turnout, topping last week's Hacktoberfest Weekend Challenge. Thank you all for helping us make these challenges such a success.

Our Touch Grass theme asked you to build something with open-source AI at its core that gets people off the screen and into the world, and you delivered. We saw a laptop that sends you outside the moment the power cuts out, a field app that turns a walk into an investigation where you go out with a question and come back with evidence, a kids' plant treasure hunt that will never let poison ivy count as a win, and more than a few apps whose whole goal was to get you to put them down. Many of you took your projects outside and told us how it went, which made reviewing your builds a blast.

Thank you to everyone who participated. Your builds made a strong case for why open innovation matters, from models running locally with no signal to tools that keep your data on your own device.

Now, let's celebrate our winners!

🎉 Congratulations To…

Overall Winner

Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 1: Touch Grass Submission 🌿

Mike Kim

Oct 6

Paper Trail: Gemma writes your walk a field card, then the screen goes away

#devchallenge #hf26challenge #ai #opensource

6 min read

Featured Category Winners

Best Use of Render

Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 1: Touch Grass Submission 🌿

Tanay

Oct 11

Golden Hour: an open model that finds your 40 minutes outside, and where to spend them

#devchallenge #hf26challenge #ai #opensource

7 min read

Best Use of TabPFN

Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 1: Touch Grass Submission 🌿

Biprayan Choudhuri

Oct 12

Turnaround: an open-source hiking buddy that knows when you should turn back, and tells someone if you don't come home

#devchallenge #hf26challenge #opensource #ai

9 min read

Best Use of Tinker

Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 1: Touch Grass Submission 🌿

Soumyadeep Dey

Oct 10

I Distilled a 397B Model Into a 4B One for $1.60. It Now Catches 28 of 33 Park Alerts That Should Stop Your Hike.

#devchallenge #hf26challenge #ai #opensource

19 min read

Best Use of Arduino

Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 1: Touch Grass Submission 🌿

Utsav bhattarai

Oct 11

I Won an Arduino UNO Q at a Hack Day. Now I'm Building a Device to Help Me Touch Grass

#devchallenge #hf26challenge

7 min read

Best Use of DigitalOcean

Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 1: Touch Grass Submission 🌿

Souvik Biswas

Oct 10

Leaf Peep: an open model reads the trees, so you know where to walk this weekend

#devchallenge #hf26challenge #gemma #digitalocean

7 min read

Best Use of Gemma

Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 1: Touch Grass Submission 🌿

Ansh Saini

Oct 10

Grow a Song: my run wrote its own soundtrack, with Gemma running on my phone

#hf26challenge #devchallenge #ai #ios

6 min read

Partner Category Winners

Best Use of Backboard

Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 1: Touch Grass Submission 🌿

Dariusz Dumnicki

Oct 11

Weekend Micro-Adventure

#devchallenge #hf26challenge

7 min read

Best Use of ElevenLabs

Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 1: Touch Grass Submission 🌿

-e.h.

Oct 12

Outside: I built a meditation app whose only goal is to make you stop looking at it

#devchallenge #hf26challenge #ai #opensource

6 min read

Best Use of Entire

Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 1: Touch Grass Submission 🌿

Changsu Seong

Oct 9

Should I Go Out? A Local Gemma Agent That Picks One Outdoor Plan, Then Tells You to Put Your Phone Away

#devchallenge #hf26challenge #ai #opensource

11 min read

Best Use of GitHub Copilot

Yuvan Shankar M

Oct 12

Touch Grass Garden: a plant tracker that only counts the days you went outside

#devchallenge #hf26challenge #hacktoberfest #opensource

7 min read

Best Use of Mastra

Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 1: Touch Grass Submission 🌿

AsiMir

Oct 11

Your photo picks the next street: a walking mystery on open-weight Gemma

#devchallenge #hf26challenge #gemma #opensource

20 min read

Best Use of MongoDB Atlas

Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 1: Touch Grass Submission 🌿

Aryan Sethi

Oct 10

LumiRoam: the tour guide for beginner photographers

#devchallenge #hf26challenge #gemma #photography

11 min read

Best Use of Sentry Agent Tracing

Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 1: Touch Grass Submission 🌿

Antonia Herrera

Oct 11

I asked Gemma to turn “I'm too tired” into “glad I went out” 🚶‍♀️

#devchallenge #hf26challenge #opensource #ai

15 min read

Best Use of SerpApi

Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 1: Touch Grass Submission 🌿

Nikitha Kishore Avadootha

Oct 12

I Made Walking a Game: Quests, a Diary, and an App That Judges Your Screen Time

#devchallenge #hf26challenge #gemma #serpapi

8 min read

Best Use of Temporal

Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 1: Touch Grass Submission 🌿

CodersAcademy006

Oct 10

Butterflies don't take weekends off: 40,000 Pune sightings and a forecast that fell apart when I removed one column

#hf26challenge #devchallenge

9 min read

Best Use of Tiger Data

Anish Kumar

Oct 6

Nice Out: an app that learns your kind of nice weather, then tells you to go outside

#devchallenge #hf26challenge #opensource #ai

5 min read

Prizes

Our overall winner will receive:

$250 USD
DEV++ Membership
Exclusive DEV badge

Our six featured category winners will each receive:

$200 USD
Exclusive DEV badge

Our ten partner category winners will each receive:

$100 USD
Exclusive DEV badge

All participants with a valid submission will receive a completion badge.

A huge thank you to our partners for making these prizes possible!

What's Next?

Hacktoberfest isn't over yet! Week 2: Side Hustle is happening now, and there's still time to enter:

Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 2: Side Hustle Submission 💸

Jem for The DEV Team

Oct 12

Join the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge: Side Hustle! $2,550 in Prizes Across 18 Winners.

#devchallenge #hf26challenge #hacktoberfest #softwaredevelopment

267

8 min read

Week 3 kicks off Monday, October 19, and Week 4 follows on Monday, October 26. Every challenge is a fresh start, so make sure to register so you don't miss an update:

The Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge: Week 3 runs October 19 to October 25. In honor of International Sloth Day, build something with open-source AI that rewards laziness: a tool for relaxation, an automation for a task you dread, or anything that makes life easier. $2,850 in prizes across 21 winners. New to Hacktoberfest this year? Instead of pull requests, you build a brand-new project with open-source AI at its core and write about it on DEV. Every challenge is a fresh start, so it's never too late to join.

Signed Up Sign Up Sign Up

See you next week 💚

Join the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge: Side Hustle! $2,550 in Prizes Across 18 Winners.

Jem — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 19:01:08 +0000

Winners Announced!

Jem for The DEV Team

Oct 23

Congrats to the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 2: Side Hustle Winners!

#devchallenge #hf26challenge #hacktoberfest #softwaredevelopment

3 min read

Week 2 of our five Hacktoberfest DEV Challenges starts today! Running through October 18, the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge: Week 2 gives you a full week to build.

This year's Hacktoberfest is all about building brand-new projects with open-source AI and open-weight models. Here's everything you need to know about Hacktoberfest 2026.

Missed Week 1: Touch Grass? No problem. Every challenge is a fresh start, so you're competing on the same footing as everyone else.

This week, we'll select one overall winner and a winner in each of our 17 partner categories. See all five challenges and current partner categories on the HF26 DEV Challenge Hub.

Let's get to it!

This week's theme: Side Hustle

Build something with open-weight models or open-source AI that someone would actually pay for.

Think small, specific, and useful. The best builds here solve a real problem for a real person, whether that's a freelancer, a small business owner, a niche hobby community, or your friend who keeps complaining about the same tedious task. A few ideas to get you going:

An invoice and receipt sorter for freelancers that runs locally, so client data never leaves their laptop
A listing writer for Etsy or eBay sellers that turns a few product photos into a polished description
A menu translator for a local restaurant that handles their specific dishes better than a generic tool

In your post, tell us why open innovation matters for what you built. Does running your own model keep costs low enough that the business actually works? Keep your customers' data private? Let you fine-tune for a niche that a general-purpose API handles poorly? Avoid getting locked into someone else's pricing? Tell us where your open-based approach worked better than a closed one.

Bonus points if you land your first user. Get it in front of someone, let them use it, and tell us how it went. Did they pay? Would they? What did they ask for next?

Side Hustle Submission Template

Prize Categories

Alongside our overall winner, we have 17 prize categories for projects that use a specific partner's technology. You don't need to use any of these to win the overall prize, but if you've been curious about any of this tech, this is a great excuse to give one a try. Full descriptions are on the hub.

Featured categories:

Partner categories:

Pro Tip: Partner category winners come from a smaller pool of submissions, so your odds are meaningfully higher.

Note: One project can enter every category it genuinely uses, but you can only win once per challenge, and we'll aim to celebrate as many different builders as possible across the month.

Free credits: several partners are giving participants credits and promo codes, including Tinker, Render, and Backboard. Claim yours at hacktoberfest.com/my.

A huge thank you to our partners for making these prizes possible!

Judging Criteria

This is DEV, so your write-up matters most.

Writing Quality (weighted most heavily): Is the post clear and engaging? Does it explain what you built, who it's for, and why open innovation matters?
Relevance to the Prompt and Theme: Is open-source AI or open-weight models at the core of the project? Is it something someone would actually pay for?
Creativity: Is it an original idea, or a fresh take on a familiar problem?
Technical Execution: Does it work, and is it well built?
Use of Partner Technology (optional): If you're entering a partner category, does the project use that technology in a meaningful way?

Show your work. We'd love to see how you built it. Save your agent session with DevRelay and embed it in your post, or link to it. It's optional, but it helps the judges understand your process.

Prizes

Overall winner (1): $250 USD, a DEV++ membership, and an exclusive DEV badge
Featured category winners (6): $200 USD and an exclusive DEV badge each
Partner category winners (11): $100 USD and an exclusive DEV badge each

All participants with a valid submission will receive a completion badge.

How To Participate

Publish a post on DEV using the submission template below. Tell us what you built and who would pay for it, show us a demo, and explain why open innovation matters for what you built. If you landed your first user, tell us about it!

Side Hustle Submission Template

Please review our judging criteria, rules, guidelines, and FAQ page before submitting so you understand our participation guidelines and official contest rules, such as eligibility requirements.

Need Help?

New to Hacktoberfest this year? Start with Everything You Need To Know About Hacktoberfest 2026.
Come hang out and ask questions in the MLH Discord.
The challenge page has resources from our partners to help you get started.

Important Dates

October 12: Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge: Week 2 begins!
October 18: Submissions due at 11:59 PM PDT
Week of October 19: Winners announced

Looking Ahead

Week 3 launches Monday, October 19 with a brand-new theme. Be sure to register so you don't miss the announcement.

Signed Up Sign Up Sign Up

Questions about the challenge? Drop them in the comments below.

Happy Hacktoberfest, and good luck!

Congrats to the Hacktoberfest Weekend Challenge: Build for a Friend Winners!

Jem — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 19:32:27 +0000

We are so excited to announce the winners of the Hacktoberfest Weekend Challenge: Build for a Friend, the first of five challenges kicking off this year's Hacktoberfest!

This was our most participated-in challenge to date, nearly tripling our previous record for submissions. We asked you to build something with open-source AI at its core for one real person in your life, and you showed up for your parents, grandparents, siblings, classmates, roommates, and friends. Many of you told us how the person you built for reacted, and those stories made judging both a joy and a challenge.

Thank you to everyone who participated. Your projects show exactly why open models matter: private data stays at home, tools run without a credit card, and builders get to shape AI around the people they care about.

Now, let's celebrate our winners!

🎉 Congratulations To…

Overall Winner

Hacktoberfest Weekend Challenge: Build for a Friend Submission 🤝

ADK BBX

Oct 4

Phone calls are the boss fight of living in Japan. 🗼

#devchallenge #weekendchallenge #hf26challenge #ai

13 min read

Featured Prize Category Winners

Best Use of Arduino

Hacktoberfest Weekend Challenge: Build for a Friend Submission 🤝

Abhinav krishna N

Oct 5

Project JARVIS: The Offline AI Lab Assistant

#devchallenge #weekendchallenge #hf26challenge

10 min read

Best Use of DigitalOcean

Hacktoberfest Weekend Challenge: Build for a Friend Submission 🤝

Alex Georgiev

Oct 2

The BMW manual was off-limits, so I built my friend something better

#devchallenge #weekendchallenge #hf26challenge #ai

10 min read

Best Use of Gemma

Hacktoberfest Weekend Challenge: Build for a Friend Submission 🤝

Uptime Architect

Oct 4

Gemma 4 reads my parent's mail at home: 39 test letters, 9 of them real, and one calm wrong answer I engineered out

#devchallenge #weekendchallenge #hf26challenge #gemma

11 min read

Best Use of Render

Hacktoberfest Weekend Challenge: Build for a Friend Submission 🤝

Vicente G. Reyes

Oct 3

Tala: Free Audio-to-Text for My Designer Friend (No Signup, No Credit Card)

#devchallenge #weekendchallenge #hf26challenge #ai

7 min read

Best Use of TabPFN

Hacktoberfest Weekend Challenge: Build for a Friend Submission 🤝

Robert Moore

Oct 4

My mate wants a sub-5 70.3. Before recommending one, I made an open model predict 79 of my old race legs.

#devchallenge #weekendchallenge #hf26challenge #ai

10 min read

Best Use of Tinker

Hacktoberfest Weekend Challenge: Build for a Friend Submission 🤝

Muaaz Shaikh

Oct 4

Rakshak: I built my parents a scam-checker that never leaves the house

#devchallenge #weekendchallenge #hf26challenge

9 min read

Prize Category Winners

Best Use of Backboard

Hacktoberfest Weekend Challenge: Build for a Friend Submission 🤝

Yash Kumar

Oct 2

Kharcha: a 4B model that reads Indian bank SMS so the money stays on your laptop

#devchallenge #weekendchallenge #hf26challenge

7 min read

Best Use of ElevenLabs

Hacktoberfest Weekend Challenge: Build for a Friend Submission 🤝

Rahul Kumar

Oct 5

Padh Ke Batao: an AI that reads my grandfather's documents to him, on a laptop with no GPU

#devchallenge #weekendchallenge #hf26challenge #ai

7 min read

Best Use of Entire

Abdul Wasih

Oct 5

Viva: a mock interview that knows which parts of your project an AI wrote

#showdev #devchallenge #weekendchallenge #hf26challenge

4 min read

Best Use of GitHub Copilot

Post not found or has been removed.

Best Use of Mastra

Hacktoberfest Weekend Challenge: Build for a Friend Submission 🤝

Bipul Chamoli

Oct 2

Prep Buddy: an AI interview coach for my classmate that runs on his laptop with the Wi-Fi off

#devchallenge #weekendchallenge #hf26challenge

8 min read

Best Use of MongoDB Atlas

Hacktoberfest Weekend Challenge: Build for a Friend Submission 🤝

Elev 💥

Oct 4

I turned my sister in law's voice notes into a cookbook that answers in her voice

#devchallenge #weekendchallenge #hf26challenge #opensource

8 min read

Best Use of Sentry Agent Tracing

Hacktoberfest Weekend Challenge: Build for a Friend Submission 🤝

Arqam Waheed

Oct 5

"If it's not in front of me, it's gone": I fine-tuned a 4B model for my friend with ADHD

#devchallenge #weekendchallenge #hf26challenge #ai

12 min read

Best Use of SerpApi

Hacktoberfest Weekend Challenge: Build for a Friend Submission 🤝

Muhammad Murtuza Hussain

Oct 2

Pīzhù 批注: a writing tutor that never rewrites your essay, built for my friend Joy (Gemma 4)

#devchallenge #weekendchallenge #hf26challenge #hacktoberfest

10 min read

Best Use of Temporal

Hacktoberfest Weekend Challenge: Build for a Friend Submission 🤝

Prateek Rai

Oct 3

PaidYet: for the friend who says “kal bhej dunga”

#devchallenge #weekendchallenge #hf26challenge #opensource

9 min read

Best Use of Tiger Data

Hacktoberfest Weekend Challenge: Build for a Friend Submission 🤝

Priyanshu Jha

Oct 5

My friend runs her supplements shop from WhatsApp voice notes, so I built her a shop helper

#devchallenge #weekendchallenge #hf26challenge #ai

7 min read

Prizes

Our overall winner will receive:

$250 USD
DEV++ Membership
Exclusive DEV badge

Our featured prize category winners will each receive:

$200 USD
Exclusive DEV badge

Our prize category winners will each receive:

$100 USD
Exclusive DEV badge

All participants with a valid submission will receive a completion badge.

A huge thank you to our partners, Render, Prior Labs, Thinking Machines, Arduino, DigitalOcean, Google, Backboard, ElevenLabs, Entire, GitHub, Mastra, MongoDB, SerpApi, Sentry, Temporal, and Tiger Data, for making these prizes possible!

What's Next?

Hacktoberfest is just getting started! We're launching a new challenge every week this month. Each challenge is a fresh start, so it's not too late to jump in. Week 1 is happening now:

Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 1: Touch Grass Submission 🌿

Jem for The DEV Team

Oct 5

Join the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge: Touch Grass! $2,450 in Prizes Across 17 Winners.

#devchallenge #hf26challenge #hacktoberfest #softwaredevelopment

266

7 min read

Week 2 launches Monday, October 12, with a brand-new theme. Register for the upcoming challenges to be notified as details drop:

The Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge: Week 2 runs October 12 to October 18. This week's theme is Side Hustle: build something with open-weight models or open-source AI that someone would actually pay for. $2,550 in prizes across 18 winners. This year's Hacktoberfest is all about building brand-new projects with open-source AI and open-weight models. Every week brings a new theme, and every challenge is a fresh start, so you're competing on the same footing as everyone else.

Signed Up Sign Up Sign Up

Happy Hacktoberfest 💜

Congrats to Our First MLH x DEV Writing Challenge Winner!

Jem — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 18:56:35 +0000

We just wrapped the very first month of the MLH x DEV Writing Challenge, our new way of celebrating MLH hackers who take the time to document what they built. We loved reading through the submissions, and we're excited to kick things off by shining a spotlight on our favorite one.

Your hackathon may end after the weekend, but as this month's pick proves, your project story is just getting started.

Let's get to it!

🎉 Congratulations To…

This Month's Winner

Pritam Patra

Sep 22

OmniML: We Built an AutoML System That Refuses to Be a Black Box

#mlhacks #devchallenge #hackathon #ai

7 min read

@pritam_patra_429a25dedae6 built OmniML, a tool that helps build AI models and explains what's happening under the hood. Instead of a black box that spits out a finished model, OmniML checks in with you along the way, letting you weigh in on how the model is built, what data it's learning from, and how it's trained. It even explains its own decisions in plain terms and flags whether the result is fair and compliant, so you're never left guessing why it made the choices it did.

Prize

This month's winner will receive:

$100 USD

Just got back from a hackathon?

Don't let your project story end there. Publish your own submission using the official submission template for a chance to be featured next month.

What's Next?

Hacktoberfest is in full-swing and we're running a new challenge every week, each with a new theme. There's still time to enter this week's challenge:

Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 1: Touch Grass Submission 🌿

Jem for The DEV Team

Oct 5

Join the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge: Touch Grass! $2,450 in Prizes Across 17 Winners.

#devchallenge #hf26challenge #hacktoberfest #softwaredevelopment

266

7 min read

Signed Up Sign Up Sign Up

See you next time!

DEV Community: Jem

Congrats to the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 3: Slow and Steady Winners!

🎉 Congratulations To…

Overall Winner

Featured Category Winners

Best Use of Render

Best Use of TabPFN

Best Use of Tinker

Best Use of Arduino

Best Use of DigitalOcean

Best Use of Gemma

Partner Category Winners

Best Use of Auth0 for AI Agents

Best Use of Backboard

Best Use of Browserbase

Best Use of ElevenLabs

Best Use of Entire

Best Use of GitHub Copilot

Best Use of Mastra

Best Use of MongoDB Atlas

Best Use of Sentry Agent Tracing

Best Use of SerpApi

Best Use of Temporal

Best Use of Tiger Data

Best Use of Ultramarine

Best Use of a .tech Domain

Prizes

What's Next?

Top 7 Featured DEV Posts of the Week

Join the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge: Ghost in the Machine! $2,850 in Prizes Across 21 Winners.

This week's theme: Ghost in the Machine

Prize Categories

Judging Criteria

Prizes

How To Participate

Need Help?

Important Dates

Thank You for an Amazing Hacktoberfest

Congrats to the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 2: Side Hustle Winners!

🎉 Congratulations To…

Overall Winner

Featured Category Winners

Best Use of Render

Best Use of TabPFN

Best Use of Tinker

Best Use of Arduino

Best Use of DigitalOcean

Best Use of Gemma

Partner Category Winners

Best Use of Backboard

Best Use of ElevenLabs

Best Use of Entire

Best Use of GitHub Copilot

Best Use of Mastra

Best Use of MongoDB Atlas

Best Use of Sentry Agent Tracing

Best Use of SerpApi

Best Use of a .tech Domain

Best Use of Temporal

Best Use of Tiger Data

Prizes

What's Next?

Congrats to the Sanity Challenge Winners!

🎉 Congratulations To…

Path One Winners: Ship an agent that queries real content

Path Two Winners: Vibe-code something strange

Prizes

What's Next?

Top 7 Featured DEV Posts of the Week

Join the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge: Slow and Steady! $2,850 in Prizes Across 21 Winners.

This week's theme: Slow and Steady

Prize Categories

Judging Criteria

Prizes

How To Participate

Need Help?

Important Dates

Looking Ahead

Congrats to the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge: Touch Grass Winners!

🎉 Congratulations To…