How Non-Coders Built 5 Software Products in 6½ Hours

Dear friends,

On Saturday at the Buildathon [http://buildathon.ai] hosted by AI Fund and DeepLearning.AI, over 100 developers competed to build software products quickly using AI assisted coding. I was inspired to see developers build functional products in just 1-2 hours. The best practices for rapid engineering are changing quickly along with the tools, and I loved the hallway conversations sharing tips with other developers on using AI to code!

The competitors raced to fulfill product specs like this one (you can see the full list here):

Project: Codebase Time Machine
Description: Navigate any codebase through time, understanding evolution of features and architectural decisions.
Requirements:

Clone repo and analyze full git history
Build semantic understanding of code changes over time
Answer questions like “Why was this pattern introduced?” or “Show
me how auth evolved”
Visualize code ownership and complexity trends
Link commits to business features/decisions

Teams had 6½ hours to build 5 products. And many of them managed to do exactly that! They created fully functional applications with good UIs and sometimes embellishments.

What excites me most isn’t just what can now be built in a few hours. Rather, it is that, if AI assistance lets us build basic but fully functional products this quickly, then imagine what can now be done in a week, or a month, or six months. If the teams that participated in the Buildathon had this velocity of execution and iterated over multiple cycles of getting customer feedback and using that to improve the product, imagine how quickly it is now possible to build great products.

Owning proprietary software has long been a moat for businesses, because it has been hard to write complex software. Now, as AI assistance enables rapid engineering, this moat is weakening.

While many members of the winning teams had computer science backgrounds — which does provide an edge — not all did. Team members who took home prizes included a high school senior, a product manager, and a healthcare entrepreneur who initially posted on Discord that he was “over his skis” as someone who “isn't a coder.” I was thrilled that multiple participants told me they exceeded their own expectations and discovered they can now build faster than they realized. If you haven’t yet pushed yourself to build quickly using agentic coding tools, you, too, might be surprised at what you can do!

At AI Fund and DeepLearning.AI, we pride ourselves on building and iterating quickly. At the Buildathon, I saw many teams execute quickly using a wide range of tools including Claude Code, GPT-5, Replit, Cursor, Windsurf, Trae, and many others.

I offer my hearty congratulations to all the winners!

1st Place: Milind Pathak, Mukul Pathak, and Sapna Sangmitra (Team Vibe-as-a-Service), a team of three family members. They also received an award for Best Design.
2nd Place: David Schuster, Massimiliano Viola, and Manvik Pasula. (Team Two Coders and a Finance Guy).
Solo Participant Award: Ivelina Dimova, who had just flown to San Francisco from Portugal, and who worked on the 5 projects not sequentially, but in parallel!
Graph Thinking Award: Divya Mahajan, Terresa Pan, and Achin Gupta (Team A-sync).
Honorable mentions went to finalists Alec Hewitt, Juan Martinez, Mark Watson and Sophia Tang (Team Secret Agents) and Yuanyuan Pan, Jack Lin, and Xi Huang (Team Can Kids).

To everyone who participated, thank you! Through events like these, I hope we can all learn from each other, encourage each other, invent new best practices, and spread the word about where agentic coding is taking software engineering.

Keep building!

Andrew

P.S. AI Dev 25 is coming to New York City on November 14! 1,200+ developers will dive into topics like AI-assisted coding, agentic AI, context engineering, multimodal AI, and fintech applications. Tickets here: ai-dev.deeplearning.ai