IBM Bobathon: AIC Hack for Humanity x MLH Hacktoberfest 2026
Ready to build? The IBM Bob-athon is a hackathon where you can use any tech stack you want, with one twist: you must use IBM Bob as your agentic coding assistant. Form a team, get briefed on the challenge, hack away, then demo your project to a panel of IBM judges! Come participate for an evening of building, prizes, and food!
This event is sponsored by IBM, and co-hosted by the AI Collective @ UC Davis as part of the Hack for Humanity initiative, as well as Major League Hacking, as part of the Hacktoberfest 2026 initiative.
Happy hacking!
Challenges
Best Use of Gemma 4
It’s time to see how much you can build with a lightweight, open model. Gemma 4 packs multimodal intelligence into an open-weights model that you can access through the Gemini API. So, what can Gemma 4 bring to your project?
- Multimodal Experience: Work with text and images to create an assistant that understands more of what users share.
- Focused AI Tools: Build a focused AI tool for learning, creativity, productivity, or your community.
- Rapid Prototyping: Experiment with an open model while using the Gemini API to move quickly from an idea to a working prototype.
Bring your idea to life… what will you build with Gemma 4 today?
Best Open-Source AI Project
Build an original project that uses open-source or open-weight AI as an important part of how it works. Teams could create an agent skill, build with an open-weight large or small language model, or build or adapt an open-source model harness. These are examples within one challenge, and teams may combine them.
Open-source or open-weight AI must be an important part of the project.
The project must be published in a public GitHub repository and use an open-source license.
An agent skill must comply with the Agent Skill Open Standard.
A model-harness entry must include an original implementation or meaningful changes to an existing open-source harness.
Submissions aren’t open for this event.