Flip the Switch hackathon: dates, prizes, tracks and how to enter

Flip the Switch is a 4 day online hackathon run by WeMakeDevs and DevTools Academy and powered by Switch, an open source tool that connects AI coding agents to team chat apps. Each team connects an agent it already uses to a chat room and builds one workflow in which the agent and the people in the room complete a real task together. Registration is open on the event page, entry is free, and the prize pool is $10,000.

The setup answers a problem every small team now has. The coding agent sits in a terminal on one person's laptop, and the rest of the team never sees what it does. Work requests travel by screenshot and copy paste. Switch moves the agent into the chat room where the team already talks, so a teammate can ask for work in plain words and watch the result arrive in the same thread.

Figure 1: The Flip the Switch format puts an AI coding agent inside the team chat, where teammates assign work and see results in one thread.

What Switch does

Switch is free and open source. You run it on your own machine and it connects your AI agent to your chat app. Claude Code, Codex and OpenCode work out of the box through the Switch Console desktop app. The event page also lists Cursor and Antigravity among the agents you can bring, and custom agents built with LangChain, Google ADK or OpenAI join through the Switch agent protocol.

You need the Switch Console and Docker on your machine. Console runs on macOS, with Windows and Linux builds in early access. The official quickstart gets an agent answering inside a chat channel in about 10 minutes. Switch also ships with Mattermost, a free chat app, so a team can build and record a demo with no company Slack or Teams workspace and no admin approval.

Prizes and tracks

The $10,000 pool splits across 3 tracks and 2 side tracks. Every submission also receives a participation certificate, and 20 submitted projects picked at random receive Switch swag.

Track	Prize	What wins it
Best Business Workflow	$2,000 cash	The most practical workflow where people and AI agents get work done together. Open to technical and non-technical participants.
Best Personal or Creative Workflow	$2,000 cash	The best use of Switch and AI agents on everyday tasks, personal projects or creative ideas.
Best Core Contribution	$100 x 20	The top 20 pull requests to the Switch open source core. Only issues with the hackathon label count, and you must be assigned before you write code.
Code with Wispr (side track)	$500 cash	The best project built by voice with Wispr Flow. Submit your Wispr usage scorecard with the project. The event link includes 1 month of Wispr Flow Pro free.
Best Blog (side track)	AirPods 5	The best published blog post about building with Switch: what you made, how you set it up, and what you learned.

One more prize runs on social media. Post about your build with the hashtag #HowISwitch and the top 5 posts each win a Logitech mechanical keyboard. You can enter several tracks with the same hackathon: a workflow, core pull requests and a blog post can all go in together.

Figure 2: The $10,000 prize pool splits across 2 workflow tracks, 20 core contribution prizes and side prizes for voice-built projects and blog posts.

How to enter, step by step

1. Register on the Flip the Switch event page. Starring the Switch GitHub repo also enters you in a draw for a Keychron keyboard.
2. Form your team. Solo entries are allowed and teams can have up to 4 people. The WeMakeDevs Discord stays open through the event for people looking for a team.
3. Install the tools. Get Switch Console and Docker running on your machine and finish the 10 minute quickstart before November 4 if you can. Setup time eats build time.
4. Connect your agent. Claude Code, Codex and OpenCode connect through Console out of the box. Your agent subscription or API key is your own cost; Switch itself is free.
5. Pick your chat room. Slack, Microsoft Teams, Discord and Telegram all connect. The bundled Mattermost room works with zero admin rights and suits demos.
6. Build the workflow between November 4 and November 7. Existing agents, libraries and templates are allowed. The Switch setup and the workflow itself must be built inside the event window.
7. Submit before 11:59 PM IST on November 7. Ship a README that shows how Switch is used and a demo video that walks through the workflow working.

The kickoff live stream runs earlier, on November 2 at 3:30 PM UK time. Watch it if your team wants the organisers' own reading of the brief before the window opens.

What the judges score

• Use of Switch. Switch has to be central. The organisers state the test plainly: would the project stop working without it?
• Technical execution. The workflow runs, and another person can clone the repo and reproduce it.
• Creativity and impact. A fresh idea that solves a problem a real team has.
• Presentation. The demo video and README make the Switch usage clear to a first-time viewer.

WeMakeDevs reviews every submission, builds a shortlist, and finalists go to judges from Switch, DevTools Academy and WeMakeDevs. Winning projects also get shown across the three organisers' channels.

Five workflow ideas that fit the brief

1. Standup clerk. Each morning the agent asks the room for updates, collects the replies, and posts one summary with blockers named. Teams get a standup record with no meeting.
2. Pull request explainer. When a pull request opens, the agent posts a plain summary in chat and collects review approvals there. Reviewers see what changed in 30 seconds per request.
3. Research assistant. A teammate names a topic in the chat and the agent returns a sourced summary into a shared document, with links kept for checking.
4. Support triage. The agent reads a support channel, groups repeated questions, drafts replies for a human to approve, and assigns each thread an owner.
5. Study group coach. For the Personal track: the agent quizzes a study group in chat every evening, tracks scores per person, and adjusts the next session to the weak topics.

Figure 3: Teams can have up to 4 people, anywhere in the world. The agent works in the same chat room as the team.

Rules that change plans

• Switch is mandatory. Your README should show how you used it, and one person per team should be able to explain the build. The organisers state that you should understand what you submit.
• Core Contribution has its own gates. Pick an issue with the hackathon label, comment with your plan, wait for assignment, then build. One issue at a time per person, pull requests must open between November 4 and November 7, and a pull request for an issue assigned to someone else will not be judged.
• Inactivity costs the issue. An assigned core issue with no activity for 48 hours can go to another contributor.
• Low effort pull requests are out. The rules name typo fixes, formatting changes and unreviewed AI output as work that will not be judged in the core track.
• Tracks stack. A workflow, core pull requests, a Wispr voice build and a blog post can all be entered in the same 4 days.

FAQ

Source for dates, prizes, tracks and rules: the official Flip the Switch hackathon page by WeMakeDevs and DevTools Academy, checked October 21, 2026.