DEV Community: Iain Thomson

Two-day hackathon kicks off AI Engineer World’s Fair

Iain Thomson — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 16:06:30 +0000

While the World’s Fair officially kicks off today a bunch of keen developers were in early, taking part in a hackathon that is offering $35,000 in prizes and credits.

Teams worked to develop AI-powered apps, but with a twist. The organizers weren’t really looking for basic apps that can just perform a single function or task. Instead, the organizers explained, they were looking for code that will learn and develop with minimal user input.

For example a team calling itself SplatForge wrote an app from scratch that had a 93% success rate in identifying and manipulating objects virtually. It linked up with Google’s Gemini engine, which then began suggesting improvements to the application’s performance.

“It adds new edge cases that the AI can improve from,” said the team leader “This is something I feel is missing today.”

Team Rote claimed that they have built the fastest AI system in the world. “Today an agent computer use can operate a real browser or desktop app, but that live reasoning
expensive unit, you repeat the same workflow. Rote turns these successful runs into memory. So, once a run is executed by a computer use agent,” explained the team leader.

“Here we're using Gemini. Another agent actually reasons and records what happens, so it compiles a run into a reusable skill. It verifies it and stores it in our shared database using MongoDB, so that the next request from anyone around the world can execute the same command instantly.”

This not only increases the speed of the system, it reduces the cost, the team said. Users save on not running the same query again and again, a useful trick given the cost of tokens these days and the continuing upward trend in cost from suppliers.

There are also guardrails built into the system to stop confidential information from users who aren’t cleared. Credentials can be set for each user or rolled out across groups - both on a physical network and over the cloud.

While the rest of San Francisco was out partying for Pride, or watching soccer matches, these developers have been coding solidly since Saturday - with the traditional support from energy drinks - and judges have been keeping a close eye on proceedings.

Hackathons are famous for producing code that makes it into wider use. For example, the Facebook Like button was built in an internal hackathon, although Mark Zuckerberg hated it at first. Hopefully this weekend’s competition will produce useful results.

For AI coding, the kids are alright

Iain Thomson — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 16:06:12 +0000

The AI Engineer World's Fair has attracted a lot of adults, and they brought their kids too, for Sunday's AI Engineering Kids Day.

Scientists agree that the best time to learn new languages, be they linguistic or computer-based, is at a young age. 87 children between eight and 16 were in San Francisco to learn how to code their own material and build their own games using AI.

Cassandra Chin from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, one of the teachers, explained that it was Minecraft that got her interested in software development. As a youngster she set up her own server and joined with others in modifying code. In the session she showed kids how to code a game and wire sensors into an Arduino Nano breadboard.

"What's important when working with kids is you inspire them to enjoy the technology," she said. "They don't have to learn all the syntax and specifics, just as long as you show them that technology is fun. Then, when they go home with their parents, they'll want to continue doing it."

Kaitlyn Hornbuckle, from Oregon State University, also taught a class on using Claude and Godot to develop 3D games. The talk covered how to build prompting skills, build GDScripts, and build a storyline that encourages other players.

"If you give them time to explore on their own, tinker around, and teach them how to be safe online, they might surprise you with what they create," she said.

The Kids Day was sponsored by graph intelligence builder Neo4j. Stephen Chin, VP of Developer Relations, explained that the company was meeting a need.

"There is a significant gap in the current school curriculum," he said. "Students who learn AI early in their career will be much more successful and have more job opportunities after graduation."

The AI Engineer World’s Fair Spreads Globally

Iain Thomson — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 16:05:03 +0000

It has been less than three years since Shawn "swyx" Wang coined the term AI engineer in an open letter to the community, but this week thousands of engineers are converging on San Francisco for the now-annual AI Engineer World’s Fair.

As he put it, AI engineers don’t need doctorates and the ability to create LLMs. Rather, they do the important work of integrating machine learning capabilities into current software effectively. “When it comes to shipping AI products, you want engineers, not researchers,” he suggested.

While the latest AI models from the likes of Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google tend to grab the consumer press headlines, the task of integrating these new capabilities into workable, sellable software is arguably more important. And adding APIs without breaking the code is a profession that appeals to many software engineers.

The concept spawned a San Francisco summit, and in 2023 there were 500 software engineers discussing the ins and outs of using this relatively new technology, with many more attendee applications than there were places.

The demand was so great, in 2024 it was renamed the AI Engineer World’s Fair, and all the big software companies were there to show off their latest advances and advise on how to use them in applications. Not to be left out, Nvidia’s CEO Jensen Huang made a couple of surprise appearances to point out his hardware was ready for this.

In 2026 the conference has now spread over four continents, with events in London, San Francisco, and New York, as well as partner conferences in Miami, Singapore, Melbourne, Paris, and Sydney. It looks set to grow further, given the interest in the topic, and software engineers who once saw their jobs as threatened by AI are now embracing it for the roles it will provide in the future.