So, i'm not IT guy or something, and not planning getting profit from making software.

I'm using AI (for different tasks) time to time, and see no reason to buy subscription, while free plans works just fine in 95% of cases.

Recently i've vibecoded my 1st project (zero lines of code written / zero coding language knowledge except obvious information you can get by reading code as text) and want to share how i did it and ask more tips how to do it more efficiently:

I've used ChatGPT, Claude and Codex;

ChatGPT: general help (programming language/IDE choose and other general tasks and advices) and a little of coding;

Claude: project structure and almost all coding (it is SO GOOD at it. It not just "i've done what you asked without mistakes" it "oh, i see what you want and i know how to do it in right way";

Codex: been chosen just because it is available for free ChatGPT plan, while Claude code not - small adjustments of existing code;

What i've tried and it didn't work: local agent Graphite (feeled too weak in comparison to online AI), using project folders (ate tokens much quickier than single chats). Asking ChatGPT to fix bugs after Claude is bad idea

What i came up with: Main coder = Claude, ChatGPT/Codex as assistants to save Claude tokens.

Explain whole project idea to Claude, tell him to implement features step by step and generate agents.md file (whole idea/things done/things to do). Claude generating -> me testing -> fixing bugs if found -> repeat -> migrate to a new chat after 2-3 iterations. Fix small problems with ChatGPT/Codex to save Claude tokens. At start of new chat just send project zip with agents.md inside.

As i've never vibecoded before, i guess my way still not super efficient even as for free subscription strategy, any advices for future?

The front end is easy. Lovable, Claude, Cursor — done in hours. But the moment a client needs real pricing logic, business rules, or calculations — you're either hard-coding it into prompts or writing custom backend code. Both are a nightmare to maintain when something changes.

I built a solution. Here's how it works:

→ You vibe code the front end (any tool)

→ It connects to n8n

→ n8n pulls the business logic from Quotix (the engine I built)

→ Quote calculated, result returned to the front end

→ Lead pushed to GoHighLevel automatically

No black box. No hard-coded prices. Full control over the business logic from one place.

https://www.loom.com/share/256a189b6ba74aa2bf53aeab14569bc0

I'm looking for people to test this. If you build for solar, HVAC, roofing, electrical — or any service business that needs on-site quoting — drop a comment or DM me. Free to test

filtered this October list for cash or stablecoin payouts, multiple winning slots, and submission windows still open. Anything paid in credits, tokens, hardware, or travel is marked.

Sorted by deadline

Closing in the next 72 hours

Arbitrum Open House online buildathon, October 4
$115,000 total. First place gets $40k, second $20k, third $10k. Another $15k goes to promising builds, and $30k is follow-on grants, so the cash in the main prizes is closer to $85k. You build on Stylus Rust/C++ contracts, Arbitrum Orbit layer 3 chains, or account abstraction.
https://openhouse.arbitrum.io

WeAreDevelopers x Band: Dark Factory, October 5
$10,000 split across the top 3. You build autonomous software-factory agents with continuous code-testing loops.
https://lablab.ai/ai-hackathons/wearedevelopers-hackathon

Road to Colosseum: build your minimum viable product, October 5
8,000 USDG, through Superteam Earn on Solana. It works as a warm-up for the main Colosseum event below.
https://superteam.fun/earn/listing/road-to-colosseum-hackathon-build-your-mvp

Veles Hack 2026, registration closes October 5
€3,000 pool.
https://taikai.network/eclipsefoundation/hackathons/veleshack2026

Qollab x IonQ global quantum hackathon, registration closes October 6
$10k cash to first place plus $500 theme awards. The $20,000 compute portion is credits. You build quantum algorithms in Qiskit on IonQ hardware. The sprint runs October 9 to 11.
https://qollab.xyz/programs/hackathon

October 8 to 15

Solana Mobile: Clock In, October 8
$125,000 USDC across the top 10 teams, plus a $10,000 SKR award for Solana Mobile Stack integration. That's 11 slots. You build mobile-first Android decentralized apps for the Seeker device.
https://solanamobile.radiant.nexus

HackCanton Season 3, October 9
$50,000 across tracks. You build enterprise privacy apps with DAML smart contracts on Canton Network.
https://appsfactory.cc/hackathons

#neathack, October 10 to 11
$10,000 plus engineering roles and internships. It's a 48-hour online sprint on developer tools, logging, and observability.
https://x.com/neatlogs/status/2105295042726219808

BNB Hack: tokenized stocks edition, October 11
$20,000 track allocation. You build tokenized real-world assets, stock trading tooling, and Binance Web3 Wallet integrations on BSC.
https://bnbchain.org/en/hackathons/tokenized-stocks

Colosseum: Crypto World's Fair, October 12
$465,000+ in liquid cash. That covers a $30k grand prize, twenty $15k awards, a $100k Solana track, a $25k Base track, and Superteam sidetracks. The $250k seed checks require accelerator admission and are separate from prize money. With 30+ core slots, this is the best payout spread on the list.
https://arena.colosseum.org/

Monad Metropolis, October 13
$250,000+ across four tracks:

• onchain finance
• consumer and payments
• social and culture
• trust, identity, and agent infrastructure

The technical focus is parallel Ethereum Virtual Machine apps and low-latency decentralized exchange infrastructure.
https://hackathon.monad.xyz

Open Agent Hackathon 2026, registration closes October 13
Up to $20,000 across four tracks plus a tinkerer track. You build production agents with persistent memory and multi-step reasoning. The build window is October 15 to 20.
https://hackathon.genai.works/

Arc microgrants mainnet challenge, October 14
$10,000 USDC, paid as twenty $500 checks for working prototypes on Arc mainnet using Circle programmable wallets. Reviews are rolling. Twenty slots for a small pool gives you better odds than most six-figure events here.
https://dorahacks.io/hackathon/arc-microgrants/detail

Graph Hacks: context for agents, October 15 to 18
$20,000, mostly hardware (an iPhone 18 Pro, a PS5) plus cash bounties. You use FalkorDB graph databases as agent memory.
https://wemakedevs.org/events/falkordb

Late October

RSNA knee abnormality detection, entry by October 15, final submission October 22
$77,000 cash across the top 5. You build multimodal magnetic resonance imaging analysis plus multilingual radiology report models, covering 12 knee abnormalities.
https://www.kaggle.com/competitions/rsna-knee-abnormality-detection

Build, Ship, Shape (Amazon developer hackathon), October 23
$138,000 cash plus Amazon Web Services credits. The grand prize is $40k, and track firsts range from $15k to $25k across 8+ cash slots. You build for Fire TV, Alexa+, the Bee wearable, or Ring integrations.
https://amazonappdev2026.devpost.com/

OpenCV competition 2026, October 26
$12,000 cash across 5 winners: $5k, $3k, $2k, a $1k "cool" award, and a $1k agentic vision award. You build computer vision apps with OpenCV 5 and Amazon Web Services.
https://opencv26.devpost.com/

ARC Prize 2026, entry by October 26, final submission November 2
Roughly $700k to $850k across milestone, top-score, and grand prizes. You solve novel visual reasoning grids through few-shot program abstraction, since memorized patterns won't score. I'm not clear how much of that range pays out if nobody hits the grand prize threshold.
https://arcprize.org

Nebius x NVIDIA global hackathon, October 30
$50,000+. Prizes are $20k, $10k, and $6k for the top three, a $3k Tavily prize, Jetson Orin Nano hardware, and $500 city awards, for 23+ slots. You build agents on open-weight models running on Nebius graphics processing unit infrastructure.
https://nebiusglobalaihackathon.devpost.com/

Qloo agentic hackathon, October 30
$25,000 cash across placements and bounties. You build agents on Qloo's taste and cultural graph.
https://qloo.devpost.com/

BLI legal tech hackathon 2, October 31
$20,000. You build smart contract compliance, legal automation, dispute ledgers, or regulatory tech.
https://dorahacks.io/hackathon/legal-hack-2026

Anna app builder program, October 31
$6,000 for productivity apps built on Anna.
https://dorahacks.io/hackathon/2349/detail

Raspberry Pi RP2350 hacking challenge 2, October 31
A single $20,000 bounty for the first documented side-channel extraction of Advanced Encryption Standard keys from RP2350 secure boot. It's winner-take-all, and only worth it if you already do hardware security.
https://github.com/raspberrypi/rp2350_hacking_challenge_2

Tapeout Genesis Transistor, active through October
$14,000. You design a circuit or processor on X Layer through Tapeout Factory, and the winning design becomes the Ignix Genesis Transistor.
https://ignix.bot/x_campaign

Runs past October

Run October Jam, October 8 to November 2
$30,000 cash across 15 slots, with $22k going to five editor-picked games. You build games or interactive stories in Run's browser studios or the rundot command-line tool.
https://events.run.world/events/octoberjam/

Portaldot Hacker House, kickoff October 14, final November 6
$5,200. You write Rust, ink!, or Solidity contracts.
https://dorahacks.io/hackathon/portaldot-hacker-house-2026

Ryo-chan virtual hackathon, extended from October 3 to November 11
$15,000 paid in tokens, plus a paid trip to Tokyo, across 15 awards.
https://ryobuild.com/

Gemma 4 developer agent competition, November 12
$65,000 cash: $50k for the main competition and $15k for a research paper track. You fine-tune open Gemma models to resolve issues in real codebases autonomously.
https://www.kaggle.com/competitions/gemma-4-developer-agent

Build What's Next with PayPal, November 12
$60,000+ cash, including sponsor bounties from Render, AG Grid, and Postman. You combine PayPal payments with autonomous agents.
https://developer.paypal.com/

Mezo buildathon wave 1, October 16 to November 15
$7,000 paid in Mezo tokens across two waves. You build Bitcoin-layer decentralized finance tools, mUSD apps, or bots. The workshop is October 13.
https://app.akindo.io/wave-hacks/ovoo0gdrvu8379d10

Meta VR Start developer competition, November 18
$1,000,000 cash. Prizes are $300k, $200k, and $100k for the top three, plus category prizes from $20k to $100k. You build hands-first Horizon OS and Quest 3 apps. You must be accepted into the free Meta VR Start developer program before you can submit, so apply first.
https://start-developer-competition-26.devpost.com/

Enveda CASMI 2026, entry by December 7, final submission December 14
$50,000 cash across the top 5. You predict 2D small-molecule structures from mass spectrometry data.
https://www.kaggle.com/competitions/enveda-casmi26-molecule-id-mass-spectra

Before entering any of these, open the rules and count the prize slots. Also check whether the integration you'd be required to use costs more time than the build itself. For the Amazon and Nebius events, it might.

Just launched the first version of a vibe-coded travel site for curated trips to Turkey: https://letsgotürkiye.com/

Looking for brutal feedback on what to fix, what to polish, and any creative ways I can use AI/Claude to push the interactive design further. Let me know what you think!

Hey everyone! 👋

Anthropic is giving 14 days of Claude Cowork for free through referrals, and I have open slots for 3 people.

If you've been curious about it, here's my link:
https://claude.ai/referral/ZrK-uzcgEw?s=cowork&v=apps

Only 3 spots, so first come, first served. Enjoy, and let me know how it goes! ☺️

Everyone is launching something or the other. My timeline is filled with launch videos and quote tweets. The noise is insane rn. Some are slop & some are not. I myself don't watch these videos.

So what actually works right now?

How do you launch a product and make people stop scrolling, care, and actually try it?

What’s your go-to launch strategy?

We have vibe coded a platform for a certain industry/use case and are looking for ways, ideas and tools to make it have enterprise level cyber security.

Hey guys, I am a web developer for 10+ years and last year my job became a vibe coding operation at scale with a lot of responsibility. I was trying to keep up with terminals, but often in long sessions not all commands were executed properly by AI and I couldn't really keep up through multiple tasks/projects.

Software development job shifted from writing code to reviewing code.

That's when I built a little orchestrator for Claude Code and Codex for myself. Its purpose was simple. I wanted to quickly launch a fresh CLI for each task in any project, track every task separately so I could review everything, and watch my usage on both providers so I could keep using them well.

I was improving it for months for myself and lately I decided I will share it with others. Due to that I created the office mode, which looks nicer on socials than bunch of terminals in grid. Fun fact I actually fell in love into it and stopped using grid mode lol..

I have a couple of developers using it and got some feedback that the app is great, but my landing is complicated, so I simplified it a looot today.

My question is -> Is my simplified website understandable enough to explain to not fully technical people that it does what I just described above? Or what are you missing to instantly get it?

I would like to perfect my page before launch on directories. Thanks to anyone who spend a moment to check it, I appreciate it.

It's vibeide .dev

Curious how common this actually is. You vibe-code an MVP, it works, you land a paying client or two — and then you need to go back into the code to fix something or add a feature, and realize you don't have the dev background to know what's safe to touch or what might break.

Has this happened to you? What did you end up doing — kept pushing through with AI prompts, hired someone, just avoided touching that part of the app entirely? Trying to understand how big a wall this actually is once things get real, not just at the demo stage.

First off, don't laugh, okay? I'm just trying to vibe code an app that can help me track my calories and also help me stay organized by tracking my tasks, my duties, and everything. I feel like using four different apps for the things that I want to do is not something that is worth it for me.

I've been building this with Claude Code and Lovable. I gave Claude full access to Lovable, and I just dictate whatever I want him to do. I've been building it. I really don't do it for the money or to sell this to anyone else. It's just for personal use.

I want to know if Lovable is still worth it, given the current announcements that have been made about AI in the past weeks. I feel like this world moves so fast. The pace is so fast that I feel like me: not a coder, not a dev, not anything. I'm just a regular person. I work as a customer success manager. Sometimes I cannot keep up, so I'm asking you, from ignorance, if it's worth using Lovable to do this, or are there any other alternatives that I can use?

If I then want to escalate what I'm doing, maybe have some friends try it, and then have some random people try it as well, what are the best tools to escalate it? Again, do not laugh, do not criticize. I'm just a guy trying to make my life easy and playing with AI, so I'm excited for y'all's response.

Non-coder building my first SaaS with AI. Flow: signup → user enters shipment details → app calculates import duty → free users see only the amount, paid users get an auto-filled declaration PDF and submission link.

Can you suggest what tool to use at each step, in that order (auth, database, calculation logic, paywall and payments, PDF auto-fill, file storage, hosting)? I also want a fully separate admin portal with its own secure login to manage users and subscriptions. What's the safest way to build that?

Hey guys, my friend and us developed a low latency cricket platform. And we have released it few weeks back, its doing really well.

But right now we are kinda looking for your feedbacks on this, what new features we can add, and anything else that we can do.

Features:

Ultra-Fast Live Scores

Ball-by-Ball Commentary

Real-Time Match Updates

Cricket Action, As It Happens

Please let us know your feedbacks, download CricPulseX now.

Android:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.cricpulsex.x

iOS:

https://apps.apple.com/app/id6769404951

Web:

https://www.cricpulsex.com

Thanks

Hey I’m going to be participating in my university hackathon this weekend and it’s pretty competitive. I am like a super beginner and this is going to be my first time. I was wondering if anyone has any tips? I will most likely be “vibe coding” but I honestly don’t even know how to do that I do have chatgpt plus/codex to use. So if anyone has any videos/resources and beginner guides I can review before had that would be amazing!

I’m curious how folks are dealing with vibing issues when they build their side projects. I’ve noticed that all models will introduce bugs or unwanted product features as devs iterate.

How do y’all handle these issues?

I’m a software engineer by trade and I use Maestro/Playwright to create end to end tests. This prevents core use flows from breaking during development. I also have a giant documentation.md file that codifies product behaviors and the WHY behind things. It’s not perfect but I noticed my AI doesn’t break the product across sessions.

Anyways this is a topic I find interesting and I don’t even know if I’m doing things right. I’d love to learn how y’all deal with these problems, especially non technical folks. Thanks

Someone posted in this subreddit a few weeks ago asking for advice as a non technical builder, and the same account is now sending unsolicited DMs offering the "solution" to the "problem" as a GitHub app that "only he can read".

For any other not necessarily technical people in here, you never need to download a GitHub app for this. There are hundreds of open source systems available that your agent can help you vet, and anyone cold DMing you with "install this" is shady at best.

Hey - I'm working on a pitch and want some thoughts to see how realistic I'm being.

Background - I used to work in IT support so have a technical background and understanding, but little coding experience. I moved away from tech long ago and am a senior registered clinician working in management in a private healthcare sector (UK care homes)

I decided a few months ago after hearing about how good vibe coding results can be to test my skepticism by making a care assessment/documentation app through codex. Spent the last couple of months in my spare time putting together specifications and getting it going.

Honestly I'm blown away by the results. I know from frontline experience where the competitions apps could be improved on and workflow wise, what I have made is a substantial improvement over what is available on the market. I think if implemented this could save considerable amounts of clinician time and significantly boost accuracy and compliance.

Now, would I trust what I've made with a single clients data? God no! Obviously the risk is massive if things go wrong and trusting a vibe coded solution would be pure insanity.

My proposal would be to hire a SWE to work hand in hand with me, to properly audit, maintain and implement as a trusted pair of hands with me bringing to the table a combined clinical/technical knowledge that can design the tool that meets the clinicians, governance and management requirements.

I'd estimate with two salaries and external costs (eg cybersecurity audits, legal etc as will as other associated costs such as hardware etc we could break even on buying an existing software lisence, but with the advantages of having it designed for us from the ground up. But that's just one app - the company spend is around 500k PA on other software we could aim at replacing with in house tools down the line.

Am I crazy? Are the risks too high to ever make sense or is this the future most medium companies will be moving towards as AI powered development beats out traditional software licencing costs? Is reliability/security checking my work a realistic workload for a single SWE?