🥈 Elisa by Jon McBee A visual programming environment for kids where you snap blocks together and Claude spins up agents to build the real code behind the scenes. The first user: his 12-year-old daughter.

🥇CrossBeam by Mike Brown California builders lose months navigating permit corrections. CrossBeam speeds up California's permitting process by giving builders and municipalities faster tools for code compliance and plan review.

Our latest Claude Code hackathon is officially a wrap. 500 builders spent a week exploring what they could do with Opus 4.6 and Claude Code. Meet the winners:

🥉 by Michal Nedoszytko Patients leave doctor's offices every day without understanding their diagnosis. Postvisit (built by a cardiologist) turns visit transcripts and medical records into ongoing, personalized health guidance.

🎨 Creative Exploration of Opus 4.6 - Conductr by Asep Bagja Priandana Play chords on a MIDI controller and Claude follows along, directing a four-track generative band around you. Runs on a C/WASM engine at ~15ms latency.

🧠 "Keep Thinking" Prize - TARA by Kyeyune Kazibwe A dashcam-to-economic-appraisal pipeline that turns road footage into infrastructure investment recommendations. Tested on an actual road under construction in Uganda.

One year ago, Claude Code itself started as a hackathon project. Now it's how thousands of founders build. Sign up for our dev newsletter to learn about future hackathons like these:

isn’t this just @scratch

"A terminal interface is not designed for a 12-year old" All of the 80's kids with an 8-bit computer:

Really cool How is this different than scratch tho w a couple more features?

Scratch but Claude Code is lowk a great idea. Gets kids to understand logic before hard syntax, while building at ADHD speed.

That sounds awesome! This is an excellent on the similar code block tools my kids learned with

kids learning to code by snapping blocks while claude runs the actual agents is a completely different experience than scratch. this is the generation that grows up thinking AI as collaborator is just... normal.

I'm guessing this didn't win because it's so close to Scratch but I think this is the long-term winner- this is genius. Vibe-coding for kids- this might be exactly how most apps are made in the future.

why is Elisa required? why not have the kids talk to Claude directly?

Hey Jon, great idea! That might be great for kids and adults alike. I completely agree with your idea about software being defined by spec and test! Here are my thoughts about the topic:

can’t see the link to this how do we test it ?

ha...HAHAHAH.... HAHAHAHAHAHA so Claude regurgitated a scratch clone akin to the bajillions of FOSS interpretations? wow. Jon is a lil visionary! I'm not sure what this sorta shit portends, but it is assuredly nothing good.

Isn't it similar to Scratch the coding for kids software ?

@grok summurize it

This is so great! Amazing job

How can i try it!!?

？？isn’t this just scratch

Congratulations to an amazing feat! Just went and research this… wow!

Kids learn fast; why not let them hack human logic?

Reminds me the lego spike

looks interesting~

Pay attention this is the future

Honestly amazing stuff John !!! Great work !

Nugget Completed. is the cutest message.

good job

This is very cool. Kids shouldn't learn coding anymore. And yes they need to be AI literate. I've done similar, just recently launched teaching kids AI Literacy. Please check it out!

actually cool

“You don’t write code, you write a spec” Brilliant

Very cool. I wonder how the refinement after the initial oneshot of the solution is handled. That is where a lot of people get frustrated and quit or are unable to improve past the initial prompt.

@shawmakesmagic

The hackathon-to-product arc is one of the most underrated stories in AI tooling right now. Claude Code going from internal experiment to the default build environment for thousands of founders in a year is a compounding effect — every project that ships makes the next one easier to justify. What makes it stick is that it's not just autocomplete. It's a collaborator that can hold context across an entire codebase and reason about architecture, not just syntax. The velocity of what's getting built with it is visible in real time at @BuiltWithClaude — a year of momentum showing up as actual products.

this is pure genious @grok how I find jim or git

This is incredible!!!