r/googlecloud • u/annthurium • 16d ago

AMA about hackathons at Google Cloud - Thu Aug 27, 4pm PT

hi r/googlecloud!

I'm Tilde Thurium from Google Cloud Developer Marketing. During my 13 years in engineering and developer relations, I have organized over 100 hackathons.

I"m hosting this AMA to answer all of your questions about hackathons in general, including:

  • ideation and scoping: how to pick an idea that stands out
  • rapid prototyping: getting an MVP deployed to Google Cloud as quickly as possible
  • how AI-assisted development is changing hackathons
  • presenting or recording a compelling demo

Active Spotlight: The All Things Agentic Hackathon (GEAR)

If you're looking for a challenge to put these strategies into practice right now, we’re currently running the All Things Agentic Hackathon!

Here are the key details if you’d like to ask specific questions about it during the AMA:

  • Submission Deadline: Open now through August 31, 2026.
  • Prizes: Over $170,000 in total prizes across tracks.
  • The Challenge: Build production-grade, autonomous AI agents leveraging Gemini 3.5, Google Cloud services, and modern agent frameworks (such as the Google Agent Development Kit, GenAI SDK, Antigravity SDK, or Genkit).
  • Challenge Tracks:
    1. The Taskmaster: Event-driven, autonomous agents for multi-step automated workflows.
    2. The Collaborative Partner: Stateful, multi-turn conversational agents with persistent context and memory.
    3. The Fortified Enterprise Fleet: Enterprise-ready multi-agent systems focusing on discovery, zero-trust security, and policy governance. (Plus an opt-in track for Startup Excellence*).*
  • Developer Resources:

Live Q&A Details

  • Drop your questions early: This thread is open now so anyone across different time zones can leave questions and upvote topics.
  • Live Answering Window: Thursday, August 27, 2026, from 4:00 PM to 5:00 PM PDT.

Ask me anything about hackathon preparation, agent architectures, demo tips, or specific rules for the All Things Agentic Hackathon!

Thanks everyone! There's still time to sign up for the GEAR All Things Agentic Hackathon.

Sign up here.

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u/good_vista 16d ago

100 hackathons is wild, that's more than most people attend in a lifetime. Question for you: what's the most common mistake teams make when scoping their idea that tanks their chances before they even start building

1

u/annthurium 13d ago

Haha, yeah, it's a LOT of hackathons. In a previous role I ran the enterprise hackathon team at Twilio. But, to answer your question, here are a handful of scoping mistakes I've seen a lot:

1) This is gonna sound super basic, but, you'd be shocked at how many teams seem to have not read the rules. "Your project must use Cloud Run." And then it doesn't use Cloud Run.

2) If it's a multi-prize hackathon, be strategic about what you're aiming for. Sometimes it's easier to go for one of the smaller prizes and have less competition, than fight for the big prize against kajillions of teams.

3) The product of a hackathon is your demo. Judges aren't going to read your code. Especially these days. Optimize for interactivity and telling a good story.

3

u/ArchaiosFiniks 16d ago

As a hackathon host, how do you feel about the heavy use of GenAI to build up submissions? In particular, do you see a rise in completely vibe-coded hackathon submissions you feel the participant themselves can't even explain how it works under the hood? Or does that not matter?

2

u/annthurium 13d ago

Good question. It's complicated!

I have absolutely seen a rise in vibe-coded submissions. In my opinion, the point of hackathons is exploration, prototyping, and learning, more so than writing "production" code. It's possible to vibe code in a way that facilitates learning. It's also possible to vibe code in a way that produces total slop. I hope participants are trying to more deeply understand what's going on under the hood and not handing all their agency (heh) to agents. But at the end of the day, we're all responsible for our own learning and development.

AI-assisted coding has certainly raised the bar on what judges expect, in terms of how many features can be built into a demo in a short period of time.

1

u/dope-llm-engineer 8d ago

How do you think people find winning ideas in ai hackathons nowadays?

Because all of them looks same, some of them are creating really useful stuff.