Call me old. (No, seriously. Do. Because it’s true.) Back in my day, a hackathon was an entire weekend affair. You showed up on Friday night. You ate terrible pizza. You drank way too much coffee or Mountain Dew or your caffeinated beverage of choice. You maybe even slept under a table. Or fell asleep unintentionally while typing. And if you and your team members managed to gel then maybe by Sunday evening you had something that — if you squinted — kind of worked. Kind of prototypey. And you were super proud of that.
These days? You kids with your newfangled AI are getting all of that same work done in the span of three hours.
Okay. I have questions. Very important questions. First and foremost, where is the time for drinking caffeinated beverages and eating bad pizza in this new AI empowered hackathon world, I ask…?
Ahem. But I digress…
I need to recalibrate for this new world order. Because that new fangled AI hacking is exactly what happened at the inaugural Claude Code Hackathon:
On February 28th, 120 hackers walked into a room in Portland with nothing but ideas and three hours on the clock. By the end of the day, 52 teams had submitted working prototypes built with Claude. PDX Hacks’ first Claude Code hackathon, co-organized with AI Collective, asked a simple question: what can you build with frontier AI before the afternoon is over?
I’m not going to steal Sam Keen‘s thunder with a huge reveal, but I will tell you that the first place winner is already turning their hackathon project into a real product. Snoopfeed is up and running in beta with plans to soft launch by March 20 — and targeting a full launch by April 15.
And there was no sleeping under tables even. What gives…?
For more on the event — including all four winners — check out “Portland Built With Claude: Meet the Winners of PDX Hacks’ and AI Collective’s Inaugural AI Hackathon.“
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