The engine of the movement

Hackathons have served as the primary engine for the vibe coding movement, transforming what was once a solitary activity into a high-stakes spectator sport. These events legitimized the workflow by proving that AI assistance could produce production-grade software in a fraction of the time required by traditional methods. Central to this ecosystem is Vibecodinghackathon.com, a platform that emerged to aggregate the exploding number of AI-focused competitions, becoming the de facto bulletin board for developers looking to compete for increasingly large prize pools.

Major competitions and prize pools

The phenomenon began in earnest with the First Vibe Coding Game Jam organized by Bolt and Pieter Levels. This event established the 80% AI code rule, challenging indie developers to ship functional web games using primarily natural language prompting. It set the cultural tone that execution matters more than manual syntax.

Bolt.new subsequently escalated the stakes with the World's Largest Hackathon. Backed by a staggering 1 million dollar prize pool, this event drew over 100,000 participants. It was a watershed moment that demonstrated the scalability of browser-based AI development environments, proving that tens of thousands of apps could be built and deployed simultaneously without local setups.

The genesis of the Bolt.new hackathon can be traced back to a viral tweet by tech influencer KP Karthik Puvvada who publicly challenged the startup community to host a massive-scale AI building event. Bolt's founder Eric Simons seized on the momentum from this single post, rapidly organizing what would become the largest vibe coding competition in history.

Other platforms soon followed suit. Replit hosted the AI4All Challenge to showcase its new autonomous Agents, focusing on apps that provided social utility. Lovable, following its rise to unicorn status, hosted design-centric hackathons that challenged users to blend generative UI with complex backend logic, further blurring the line between designer and developer.

TanStack Start Hackathon

In late 2025, the TanStack Start Hackathon represented a convergence of traditional full-stack engineering and modern vibe coding tools. Hosted by a coalition of major dev-tooling companies including Convex, CodeRabbit, Firecrawl, Netlify, Autumn, Sentry, and Cloudflare, this event challenged developers to build rich, interactive applications.

The stakes were incredibly high, with a total pool of 640,000 dollars in cash, prizes, and credits. The prompt focused on showcasing the capabilities of TanStack Start, a full-stack framework powered by TanStack Router. Participants were tasked with leveraging features like full-document SSR, streaming, and server functions. Notably, VibeCodingWiki.com itself was created as a submission during this hackathon, serving as a meta-example of how modern frameworks and AI tools can rapidly produce comprehensive documentation platforms.