By Steve Ngok, Chief Strategy Officer, DoraHacks
I just returned to Singapore from the US and noticed a lot has changed compared to last year. Progress, I’d say. When it comes to developer events, Singapore is getting closer and closer to San Francisco. Many leading tech giants and AI companies are setting up offices here, expanding their teams, and actively organizing developer events to grow their presence in Asia.
When I was chatting with a new friend from OpenAI’s Singapore office about recent hackathons I’ve organized and attended, he asked me: "What’s the vibe like at these hackathons lately?"
I paused for a moment.
I. What is Vibe Coding?
At DoraHacks, my mission is to design, launch, and organize hackathons with our partners. Sinc…
By Steve Ngok, Chief Strategy Officer, DoraHacks
I just returned to Singapore from the US and noticed a lot has changed compared to last year. Progress, I’d say. When it comes to developer events, Singapore is getting closer and closer to San Francisco. Many leading tech giants and AI companies are setting up offices here, expanding their teams, and actively organizing developer events to grow their presence in Asia.
When I was chatting with a new friend from OpenAI’s Singapore office about recent hackathons I’ve organized and attended, he asked me: "What’s the vibe like at these hackathons lately?"
I paused for a moment.
I. What is Vibe Coding?
At DoraHacks, my mission is to design, launch, and organize hackathons with our partners. Since the rise of large language models and ever-evolving developer tools, vibe coding has become the central theme of my work.
If you haven’t heard of vibe coding yet, it’s the hottest term in the developer community in 2025, and probably will still be in 2026.
Ask AI, and it’ll tell you: vibe coding is building products without writing code yourself. Instead, you use LLMs and advanced developer tools—just input simple instructions, and agents automatically design and develop products for you.
But breaking down the term and reflecting on my recent experiences, I believe vibe coding is a creative process where vibe comes first, then code.
The "vibe" is the creator’s taste, aesthetics, intuition, and experience.
Vibe coding is the realization of that taste and aesthetics, the execution of intuition and experience, letting high-speed agents help bring products to life and iterate rapidly under the creator’s direction.
II. Hackathons in the Post-Vibe-Coding Era
If you’re reading this, I’ll assume you’re familiar with traditional hackathon setups.
In the post-vibe-coding era, hackathons have new formats, new definitions, and new purposes.
With vibe coding, you can deliver working products at incredible speed. Hackathon outputs have evolved from minimum viable products to highly usable, feature-rich products.
Because of this, hackathon design and rules become critically important.
Traditional rules prohibited over-reliance on AI.
Now, the expectation is to embrace AI—the more fluently you use it, the better.
Traditional bounties asked you to build something specific but perhaps a bit boring.
New challenges can be: "Build a tool people can’t help but share" or "Build something you’d actually use every day."
Traditional hackathons typically had a 48-72 hour window.
Vibe hackathons could be 6-24 hours, organized weekly or monthly. Failure is allowed. Looking like a toy is allowed. Half-finished is allowed.
Traditional judging focused on product completeness and potential value.
New criteria: Would someone actually use your product for more than 3 minutes? Would they share it with others?
III. Who Should Run Vibe Coding Hackathons?
With vibe coding in the mix, hackathons should become a culture: rapid innovation, rapid iteration, constantly honing judgment, aesthetics, and intuition.
Code is no longer scarce. People with vibes are the new scarce resource.
So who should be organizing these hackathons? Here are some examples for you (AWS/Amazon Developer Tools and blockchain layer-2 Stacks). In general, three types of players are best positioned:
1. Developer Tools Companies
If you’re building tools that developers use to create, you should be running hackathons constantly. Your hackathons showcase what’s possible with your stack, build community, and discover power users.
- OpenAI should run Codex-focused hackathons, pushing developers to explore AI-native coding
- Microsoft can run Azure AI and GitHub Copilot hackathons with their integrated ecosystem
- NVIDIA should organize hackathons around GPU-accelerated tools and inference APIs like NIM and NeMo
- Cloudflare can host Workers and edge computing hackathons, challenging developers to build fast, globally distributed apps
- Anthropic with Claude Code, Cursor with their AI editor, Vercel with v0 and Next.js... the list goes on
Every developer tools company should ask: "Are we running enough hackathons?"
2. Companies with Vertical Use Cases
Enterprises with real-world problems and proprietary data are goldmines for hackathon challenges. They bring:
- Authentic scenarios that can’t be googled
- Real data (anonymized when needed)
- Clear success metrics
- Potential to adopt winning solutions
Their goals: internal innovation (solving problems that seemed unsolvable, improving efficiency in ways that weren’t possible before) and talent discovery (finding the builders who "get it").
3. The Power Combo: Tools + Enterprise
Developer tools companies often have major enterprise clients. Why not co-organize?
Imagine AWS partnering with DBS Bank to run a fintech hackathon. Or Microsoft and a healthcare company co-hosting a medical AI challenge. The tools company brings the platform and developer community; the enterprise brings the real-world context and problems worth solving.
These partnerships create hackathons that are both technically exciting and commercially meaningful.
IV. How Often Should They Run?
The short answer: Anytime, Anywhere; All the time, Everywhere.
Traditional thinking says hackathons are big, expensive events you run once or twice a year. That model is outdated.
In the vibe coding era, hackathons should be:
- Frequent: Weekly or monthly, not annually
- Lightweight: 6-24 hours, not 48-72
- Always on: Running continuously across time zones and communities
The bottleneck used to be logistics, cost, and coordination. But with the right tools, this bottleneck disappears.
DoraHacks helps developer tools companies and enterprises achieve "hackathons everywhere, all the time" through automated hackathon infrastructure and DevRel tooling. Submission management, judging workflows, prize distribution, community engagement—all streamlined so you can focus on the builders, not the operations.
The companies that embrace this will build the strongest developer ecosystems. The ones that stick to annual hackathons will fall behind.
So, when shall we expect the next cool vibe coding hackathon hosted by yourself?
About DoraHacks
DoraHacks is the leading global hackathon community and open source developer incentive platform. DoraHacks provides toolkits for anyone to organize hackathons and fund early-stage ecosystem startups.
DoraHacks creates a global hacker movement in Web3, AI, Quantum Computing and Space Tech. So far, more than 30,000 startup teams from the DoraHacks community have received over $300M in funding, and a large number of open source communities, companies and tech ecosystems are actively using DoraHacks together with its BUIDL AI capabilities for organizing hackathons and funding open source initiatives.