72 hours to build one thing and show that it works. Everybody competes from home. We read every application by hand and we turn most of them down.
A demo only its author can drive isn't a solution. That is the whole premise. You get 3 days, a single problem you actually care about, and an audience on Wednesday afternoon that will ask what your thing does when the input is garbage.
All of it runs online. No venue, no flights. You work at your own desk on your own hours, with a team you bring or a team we put you in on Monday morning.
The group stays small on purpose. Judging 40 demos carefully takes longer than judging 400 badly, and we would rather do the first one.
You get mentors who have run this kind of system in production. You get judges who ask the question you were quietly hoping nobody would ask. And you get 3 days without meetings, which for most of us is the rarer prize.
Build something that survives contact with a user.
Pick one when you apply. Switch on Monday if your team drags you somewhere better.
Software that takes several steps on somebody's behalf and knows when to stop. What we care about is what yours does on the step that fails.
The part a person touches. A chat box bolted to the corner of an existing product is the low bar. Clear it.
Getting the right context in front of the model. Search, ranking, memory, structured sources, whatever it takes to keep the answer honest.
How you know it works. Then how you find out it stopped working, before a user has to tell you.
The layer everything else sits on. Extra credit for a pipeline that stays upright when somebody changes the input format at 2am and mentions it to nobody.
Anchor sessions get recorded so nobody loses a day to a timezone. Between them you build.
Briefs and teams
Build and break
Ship and show
This one isn't open to everybody. We don't count years and we have no opinion about your title. We do want to see a thing you built that somebody other than you has used.
A side project with 12 real users counts. So does a research prototype that somebody else has run without you sitting next to them. A repository with a beautiful README and nothing behind it does not.
Send the work first. We'll read that before we read anything else about you.
The first AI Solutions Makers Hackathon ran on October 9 and 10, 2025. 2 days. Fully remote. Put together fast, mostly to find out whether the format held up at all.
It held. People turned up with a problem on Thursday morning and left on Friday evening with something running, and the demos that afternoon were sharper than what we've sat through at conferences 10 times the size.
The same complaint came back from almost everybody: 2 days was not enough. Nobody wanted more programming or more panels. They wanted more hours at the keyboard.
So the 2026 edition adds a third day and a judging panel we recruited months in advance rather than the week before. The rest stays as it was. Small group, remote, no filler, real deadline.
Judges are the reason the demos are worth watching. We want people who have built this kind of system themselves and can tell a good demo from a good system inside of 90 seconds.
The commitment comes to a few hours. 1 briefing call in advance, a midpoint check-in with a couple of teams, then demos on Wednesday. All remote, and you pick the tracks you're closest to.
Mentors do the less visible half of it. You hold office hours, somebody shares a screen with a stack trace on it, and you save that team half a day. 2 hours is a useful shift. Take the slots that fit around your actual week, on the subjects you know cold.
If you've debugged this at 1am, somebody here wants to talk to you.
The same address, whichever way you want in. Write to us. Every email gets read and every email gets an answer, including the nos.
Bring a team or come alone and we'll place you on Monday morning.
A few hours across the 3 days, remote, on the tracks you know best.
Office hours in whatever slots suit you, on the subjects you know cold.
Either way, the address is hello@aisolutionmakers.com
Yes. Every session happens online and there is no in-person component at any point. You need a laptop and a connection you trust.
Plenty of people do. We run team formation on the first morning. You can also compete alone if that suits you better.
No, and please don't. Anchor sessions are recorded and mentor hours are spread across timezones. Work the hours your body actually keeps.
You do. Your team keeps the code and everything around it. The only thing we ask is that you demo it publicly on the last day.
Turn up with a stack you know and any boilerplate you'd reach for on a normal project. The solution itself gets built during the 3 days.
Yes. Say so in your email and tell us which one you'd rather do if we have to pick.
We review as they arrive and stop when the group is full, so earlier is better. Email us and we'll tell you honestly where things stand.
Bring back something that works. September 28-30, 2026, virtual, applications read as they arrive.