Build an agent that does real work on AWS.
Two weeks. One track. Eight teams demo live on stage at AWS Community Day in front of 200+ builders. Up to $3,200 in AWS credits on the line.
- Build window: Tuesday, September 29 to Tuesday, October 13, 2026
- Submissions due: Sunday, October 11, 11:59 PM PT
- Finals: AWS Community Day, AI Edition, October 13, 2026, AWS Builder Loft, 525 Market St, Floor 2, San Francisco, CA 94105
- Teams and announcements: the hackathon Slack channel. The invite and channel links are in your kickoff email.
- Questions: Ask in the Slack channel so everyone gets the answer, or use Contact the Host on the Luma page for anything private. Replies within 24 hours.
The challenge: Hand it off
Build an agent that takes over a task a specific person does by hand every week, and produces something that person would accept without redoing it.
Three requirements, and judges will check all three:
- Name the person. A real role, not a persona: a clinic scheduler, an on-call SRE, a landlord with twelve units. Your writeup says who they are and what the task costs them today.
- Call at least one tool you didn't build. An AWS service via tool use, a public API, or an MCP server. The agent has to act, not just talk.
- Show the failure path. Your demo video shows what happens when that tool fails, returns garbage, or disagrees with the model. Happy path only is a demo, not an agent.
Everything else is open: domain, model, framework, number of agents.
What this is not: a chatbot with a nice UI, a RAG app that answers questions about documents, or a pipeline where a human still does the last step.
No project yet? Eight starter ideas that already meet all three requirements are posted in the Slack channel. Pick one, adapt it, or bring your own, and choose a lead by end of day Friday, October 2.
Two weeks is enough for a working prototype, not a finished product. Judges know that. Scope accordingly.
Your team
- Registration closed on September 28 and teams are formed. Team assignments are posted in the hackathon Slack channel.
- Teams are capped at 4. Solo registrants are matched by project theme, and each team has a lead: the person who brought the idea.
- Find your team, email your teammates, and create a channel named #hack-<your team>, for example #hack-s07. If you can't reach someone by Friday, October 2, DM the hackathon lead and you will be reassigned.
- You must be registered for AWS Community Day. Finalists present in person, and you can't be called on stage without it.
- Organizers, judges, and their immediate work teammates can't win prizes.
- Not registered for Community Day yet? Register here, it is free.
Rules
- All hackathon work starts on or after September 29, when the kickoff email went out. Open-source libraries and frameworks are fine. Renaming an existing project is not.
- Your project must meet all three challenge requirements above.
- Use at least two AWS services, and at least one must be an AI service: Bedrock, AgentCore, Strands, SageMaker, Transcribe, Rekognition, and similar all count.
- Your code must be in a public GitHub repo. Private repos, invite-only links, and zip files will not be accepted. The repo must be public at the time you submit and stay public through October 13. License it MIT or Apache 2.0.
- No production customer data, PHI, or PII. Use synthetic or public datasets.
- You own your IP. We just want to see it.
- Be kind. The event code of conduct applies to every channel and the day itself.
Timeline
| Date | What happens |
|---|---|
| Mon Sep 28 | Registration closed. |
| Tue Sep 29 | Hackathon starts. Kickoff email goes out with team assignments, the challenge and the rules. Build begins. |
| Fri Oct 2 | Teams without a project pick one and choose a lead. Teammates who can't be reached get reassigned. |
| Mon Oct 5 | Submission form and writeup template posted in the Slack channel. |
| Sep 29 to Oct 11 | Build. Questions go in the hackathon Slack channel. |
| Sun Oct 11, 11:59 PM PT | Submissions due. No extensions. |
| Mon Oct 12 by 6 PM PT | Finalists notified by email. |
| Tue Oct 13 | Community Day. Finalists check in at the hackathon room, dry-run on the main stage over lunch, demo live at 4:15 PM after the closing remarks. Winners announced right after the last demo. |
How to submit
By Sunday, October 11, 11:59 PM PT, submit via the submission form. The four items below won't change, so build toward them now.
- Public GitHub repo (MIT or Apache 2.0) with a README that runs. We open the link logged out; if it 404s, it doesn't count.
- 3-minute demo video, YouTube unlisted or Loom. Include the failure path. This is also your backup if the live demo fails, so make it good.
- One-page writeup using the template: who the person is, what the task costs them today, an architecture diagram, AWS services used, and what you'd build next.
- Team roster with names and emails. This is how credits get issued, so get it right. No roster changes after the deadline.
Download the writeup template (Word) → Fill in every section, keep it to one page, and export it as a PDF for the submission form.
How you'll be judged
Every criterion is scored 1 to 5 by each judge.
Technical depth
30%
A 5 looks like: Real agentic behavior (planning, tool use, memory), sound AWS architecture, more than a prompt wrapper
Real-world usefulness
25%
A 5 looks like: Solves a problem a real user has, clear target user, plausible path to adoption
Responsible AI
20%
A 5 looks like: Guardrails, handles failure and hallucination, considers privacy and misuse, cites data sources
Demo and communication
15%
A 5 looks like: Works live, tells a clear story, honest about limitations
Completeness and polish
10%
A 5 looks like: Runs from the README, has tests or evals, clean repo
Round 1 (Oct 12): Judges score every submission asynchronously from your video, repo, and writeup. The top 8 become finalists.
Round 2 (Oct 13): Finalists demo live and are re-scored. You get 5 minutes, hard stop, with a visible timer. Judges may ask a quick question or two in the 1-minute changeover. Final score is 40% Round 1 and 60% live demo.
Judges decide right after the eighth demo and the winners are announced on stage before the room empties, around 5:00 PM.
Prizes
- Winning team: $2,000 in AWS credits ($500 per member, up to 4 members)
- Runner-up team: $1,200 in AWS credits ($300 per member, up to 4 members)
All 8 finalists get their demo recorded and featured on the AWS Community Bay Area YouTube channel, plus a shout-out from the organizers on LinkedIn.
Credits are AWS promotional credits applied to your own AWS account, issued within about two weeks after the event. Make sure every team member has an AWS account in their own name. Promotional credits typically have an expiry date and some service restrictions; we'll share the exact terms when codes are issued.
Finalist day-of checklist (Oct 13)
- Arrive when doors open at 9:30 AM and check in at the hackathon room (the Track B room, yours until 2:00 PM).
- Do the mandatory dry run with a volunteer on the main stage during lunch, 1:00 to 2:00 PM. Every team, no exceptions.
- Bring your own laptop, charger, and any adapters. We'll have HDMI and USB-C at the stage.
- Have your backup video open in a tab.
- Practice the 5-minute version. Then practice the 4-minute version.
Tips from the organizers
- Pick the demo moment first, then build backward from it.
- A narrow agent that reliably does one thing beats a broad agent that sometimes does five.
- Show the failure handling. Judges love seeing what happens when the tool call errors out.
- Ask early. Nobody has ever regretted posting a question in the channel on October 3 instead of discovering the problem on October 11.
See you on stage October 13.
Hackathon lead: Shravanth Venkatesh, AWS User Group Leader, Bay Area