Announcing Buildathon!: DeepLearning.AI and AI Fund announce Buildathon, which challenges AI buiders to engineer software projects rapidly. Sign up to compete on August 16, 2025!

We’re organizing a new event called Buildathon: The Rapid Engineering Competition, to be held in the San Francisco Bay Area on Saturday, August 16, 2025!

Buildathon promo: Real-time code editor for collaboration and personal finance tracker for spending insights and budgeting.
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Dear friends,

We’re organizing a new event called Buildathon: The Rapid Engineering Competition, to be held in the San Francisco Bay Area on Saturday, August 16, 2025! You can learn more and apply to participate here.

AI-assisted coding is speeding up software engineering more than most people appreciate.  We’re inviting the best builders from Silicon Valley and around the world to compete in person on rapidly engineering software.

I’ve observed a wide spectrum of AI adoption among software engineers. Some use AI only occasionally — for example, asking LLMs basic coding questions. Others have integrated AI-assisted IDEs like Cursor or Windsurf into their daily work. More advanced users are skilled at directing agentic coding assistants such as Claude Code and Gemini CLI. A small but growing group is now orchestrating multiple AI agents working in parallel across different parts of a large codebase.

In tech, the desire to chase the latest shiny technology sometimes leads individuals and even businesses to switch tooling more often than necessary. But the rapid evolution of AI coding tools means teams that are half a generation behind can be significantly less productive than those at the bleeding edge.

Code autocompletion by GitHub Copilot was cutting-edge 2 years ago, but it’s nowhere near what is possible now! For example, my team AI Fund routinely goes from a product idea to a basic working product or prototype in hours. This is why overcoming the Product Management Bottleneck — deciding what to build rather than the actual building — occupies a growing part of our effort.

DeepLearning.AI and AI Fund are organizing this Buildathon competition to see how quickly the best developers can build products. We’ll provide a loose product spec, say on a Real-Time Multiplayer Code Editor or Personal Finance Tracker (see above). Historically, these products may have taken a team of 2 or 3 engineers weeks or months to build. But we hope participants will be able to build them in closer to 60 minutes. You can read more about the competition format here.

If you use AI-assisted coding to engineer software quickly, please join our Buildathon here and show us your skills!

Keep building!

Andrew