We're running a hackathon: build MCP apps with Archestra (July 22–29, $2,250 in prizes)

Margaret Rimek — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 12:29:03 +0000

I work at Archestra, and we're running a one-week online MCP Apps Hackathon: take one of your typical workflows and turn it into an app your team could use tomorrow.

July 22–29, online, free, open worldwide, solo or teams
$1,000 for the Most Useful App
$750 for the Best Weird App (games and wonderfully weird interfaces have their own prize — usefulness not required)
$500 + swag for Community Buzz: post your app anywhere public (LinkedIn, X, Reddit, Hacker News), tag or mention Archestra [@archestra_ai], most-liked post wins Register here

How building works
Archestra is an open-source AI platform. You describe the app in chat, it generates the interface, and the app talks to your real tools (GitHub, Jira, Slack, whatever your workflow lives in) through MCP (Model Context Protocol) servers, with your credentials. No deploy, no hosting, no login flow to build.

Setup is Docker plus an LLM API key — about 15 minutes. If you don't have a paid key - Cerebras has a free tier and local Ollama works. The full quickstart goes out to registrants on July 22.

What a submission looks like
A video of your app in action, the prompt you used, and which MCP servers it talks to. Every eligible submission goes into the public gallery on our website.

An app can be anything: a PR review queue, an invoice tracker, a contract review pipeline, a deploy dashboard, an LLM cost dashboard per project, etc. Or ignore all of that and build a game — last month someone on our team built a pub round ledger that our London office actually uses, which sits somewhere between the two prizes.

Register here — we'll send full brief, quickstart, and example apps to your inbox on July 22. Questions in the comments welcome, I'll be around.

DEV Community: Margaret Rimek

We're running a hackathon: build MCP apps with Archestra (July 22–29, $2,250 in prizes)