DEV Community: The DEV Team

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

103

7 min read

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

Happy Hacktoberfest! 🦥

What was your win this week?

Jess Lee — Fri, 30 Oct 2026 13:00:00 +0000

👋👋👋👋
Looking back on your week -- what was something you're proud of?
All wins count -- big or small 🎉

Examples of 'wins' include:

Getting a promotion!
Starting a new project
Fixing a tricky bug
Remembering to drink your water every day 💧

Happy Friday!

Your DEV posts have a beautiful new share card ✨

Jess Lee — Tue, 27 Oct 2026 16:44:29 +0000

The image that shows up when you share a DEV post just got a brand-new look!

I got to work on forem/forem#24071 last week and I'm so excited to see it live in production:

Redesign generated social images as quote cards that work on X and LinkedIn #24071

jessleenyc posted on Oct 22, 2026

What type of PR is this? (check all applicable)

[ ] Refactor
[x] Feature
[x] Bug Fix
[x] Optimization
[ ] Documentation Update

Description

Articles without a cover image get a generated share image (articles.social_image). In the last 30 days on DEV, that was 73% of published posts. The old card had two problems:

It repeated the title. X, LinkedIn and Slack already show the title as text next to the image.
X's title label covered the byline. X overlays the post title in a dark label inset at the bottom-left of link cards, right on top of the author's name and date.

New design: the card quotes the opening of the post inside a browser-window frame over a soft mesh gradient. A byline row shows the avatar, name, date and reading time, and the community's horizontal header logo (Settings::General.resized_logo, falling back to logo_png) sits in the window's title bar.

One image for every platform: the card is sized so its top and bottom margins both equal X's 80px keep-clear zone.

X's title label covers only the gradient.
The card is vertically centered where nothing is overlaid (LinkedIn, Slack, iMessage, …).
A spec enforces both. No schema change and no view change.

Quote (Images::SocialImageQuote):

Uses top-level opening paragraphs. Skips paragraphs that are entirely italic (challenge "This is a submission for…" intros), paragraphs that repeat the title, and headings, code, images and blockquotes. Blockquotes usually quote someone else, and the card attributes the text to the author.
Joins short paragraphs until there are at least 80 characters, then cuts at the last sentence end within 180 characters, or at a word with "…".
Falls back to the title when the post has no usable paragraph.

Colors:

The author's brand color (brand_color1, or the organization's bg_color_hex) becomes an analogous palette.
Otherwise one of four Forem gradient palettes is chosen from the article ID, so cards vary. Only about 6% of authors with coverless posts set a brand color.

Regeneration: in addition to title, publish date and author (#24063), Article#generate_social_image now also fires when:

the reading time changes,
a body edit changes the quote. Old and new quotes are compared, so edits further down the post don't re-render.

Bug fixes along the way

Text escaping: user text is now rendered with label:/caption: and escaped, never with -draw text.
- Through MiniMagick, -draw runs in mogrify, which takes the escapes literally. A name like @jess or 50% showed \@jess / 50\% on today's cards.
- In caption:/label:, an unescaped leading @ makes ImageMagick read a file into the image. This was verified locally, and a spec covers it.
Stylized Unicode names: names such as 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐋𝐚𝐳𝐲 𝐆𝐢𝐫𝐥 rendered blank (Noto Sans has no math-alphanumeric glyphs). They're now NFKC-normalized. Emoji are dropped from the name and quote for the same reason.
Fonts: font/fill are set before each draw. Previously they came after the draw calls, so the date had no font set.
Wrapping uses real glyph widths (caption: plus a shrink-to-fit loop) instead of character-count heuristics.

Performance

About 1–2s per article on my machine.
Intermediate steps use uncompressed MIFF, so PNG is encoded once. Per-step PNG encoding was the bottleneck.
The gradient is drawn at 400×209 and scaled up.
Output is 8-bit RGB PNG, about 100KB.
No external services or AI are involved; it's ImageMagick only.

Production runs ImageMagick 6 (Debian bullseye), so the generator sticks to IM6-compatible operations: xc:, simple draws, blur, resize, caption:/label:, Over compositing, and the existing rounded_mask.png for avatars.

Related Tickets & Documents

Builds on forem/forem#24063 (regenerates the image when an article's author changes), which is merged into this branch. Its author-change trigger is kept.

QA Instructions, Screenshots, Recordings

Publish a post without a cover image and let Images::SocialImageWorker run. Check article.social_image.
Paste the post URL into X's composer and into LinkedIn's post preview. The quote and byline should be fully visible on both, with X's title label over the gradient only.
Edit the first paragraph → the image regenerates. Edit only a later paragraph (same reading time) → no regeneration.

Before / after

Simulated X and LinkedIn link-card previews. Each post is rendered with today's generator and with this PR's generator. The X frame follows X's current layout (the title label inset at the bottom-left) and was checked against a real X post. The long-title example also shows a bug in today's card: long titles run off the right edge.

The design was reviewed an

d signed off by @jessleenyc.

Known limitation (pre-existing): Noto Sans has no CJK glyphs, so CJK text still renders as boxes, as it did in the old title-based card.

Added/updated tests?

[x] Yes
- Images::SocialImageQuote: paragraph selection, skip rules, sentence/word cuts, Unicode cleanup, title fallback.
- Images::GenerateSocialImageMagickally: stored image for Article/User/Organization; X keep-clear and vertical centering; a real ImageMagick render at 1200×627; the @file escaping regression; palette, accent, name and meta helpers; read_files and logo caching.
- Article#generate_social_image: quote-change, later-edit and reading-time triggers.

Local test status: the DB-free SocialImageQuote examples pass, and real renders were checked locally on ImageMagick 7. The DB-backed specs rely on CI, because the current schema needs pgvector, which my local Postgres lacks. CI also exercises the real-render spec on ImageMagick 6.

[optional] Are there any post deployment tasks we need to perform?

None. No migration, and no backfill: existing images update when a post's title, date, author, reading time or opening changes.

View on GitHub

Meet the new card

Every post now gets a quote card. It pulls the opening of your post and sets it inside a little browser-window frame over a gradient. Below that sits your profile pic, name, publish date, and reading time.

Most places that unfurl a link already show its title, so I wanted to remove the redundancy. It shows the first lines of your post instead. That's where your voice is, and now it's the first thing people see when your post is shared!

Color comes from your profile's brand color if you've set one. If not, the card uses one of our four palettes, so a page full of shared posts feels varied and bright.

One image, everywhere

There's one image, and it unfurls anywhere your link gets shared. It's sized with roomy top and bottom margins, so even when a platform (ahem, X) lays its own label over the image, your name and details stay clear.

A few extra touches

While we were in there, we polished a few more things:

Names with @ or % display cleanly, without stray backslashes.
Names in stylized Unicode (𝓯𝓪𝓷𝓬𝔂 𝓽𝓮𝔁𝓽 like this) render properly.
The image refreshes when your reading time or opening quote changes, so it stays current after you edit.

Thank you to Ben for the review and merge!

A little history

Back in 2018, Ben wrote about how DEV generated social images in the first place:

Ben Halpern

Feb 26 '18

How dev.to dynamically generates social images

#meta #ruby #webdev

3 min read

In August 2023, Ben moved generation in-house with ImageMagick (#19949). It was a great cost savings to host every post's card ourselves, on our own infrastructure, instead of handing it to a third-party service. Everything in this redesign builds on that foundation.

Go see yours

Share one of your posts (without a cover image) and take a look at your new card. Tag us (@thepracticaldev) or me (@jessleenyc) on X so I can admire it. If anything looks off, like a name that renders strangely or a quote that cuts off in a weird spot, let me know in the comments!

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! 🎃

What was your win this week!?

Jess Lee — Fri, 23 Oct 2026 13:00:00 +0000

👋👋👋👋
Looking back on your week -- what was something you're proud of?
All wins count -- big or small 🎉

Examples of 'wins' include:

Getting a promotion!
Starting a new project
Fixing a tricky bug
Getting to inbox zero, even for five whole minutes 📬

Happy Friday!

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

266

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 💚

What was your win this week?!

Jess Lee — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 13:00:00 +0000

👋👋👋👋
Looking back on your week -- what was something you're proud of?
All wins count -- big or small 🎉

Examples of 'wins' include:

Getting a promotion!
Starting a new project
Fixing a tricky bug
Nailing a new recipe on the first try 🍝

Happy Friday!

DEV Community: The DEV Team

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?

What was your win this week?

Your DEV posts have a beautiful new share card ✨

What type of PR is this? (check all applicable)

Description

Bug fixes along the way

Performance

Related Tickets & Documents

QA Instructions, Screenshots, Recordings

Before / after

Added/updated tests?

[optional] Are there any post deployment tasks we need to perform?

Meet the new card

One image, everywhere

A few extra touches

A little history

Go see yours

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?

What was your win this week!?

Congrats to the Sanity Challenge Winners!