Build With AI: Basics

Build a working first draft of an app in an afternoon using AI best practices, with a set of reusable skills in your coding agent. Learn with a live build session, office hours, community, and a $2,500 prize pool, while creating something useful to your work or your life.

About the challenge

Devpost has launched a new kind of hackathon: shorter, built around learning, and open to join every month.

Have you ever asked an AI to help you code something, only to watch it repeat a mistake you already fixed, forget a decision you made ten prompts ago, or hand back code that "works" but you can't explain? It happens to almost everyone who starts building with AI. Nobody showed you the basics.

This hackathon does. You'll build a proof of concept: a small app that runs and does one thing end to end. To get there, you'll install the Devpost Learn Skill Pack, step-by-step guides that live inside your coding agent (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, or any agent that supports skills). The skills interview you about your idea, help you plan it before any code gets written, build it with you, and get it ready to submit. You'll finish with a running app, the plan that got you there, and a habit you can reuse on every project after this one.

Why join

• Learn to plan before you build, by letting the AI interview you. It's the habit that keeps AI-built projects from turning into a mess.
• Try skills in your coding agent: reusable, step-by-step guides that work across Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, and others.
• Get help from real people: a live build session, office hours, and a live project review.
• Win a share of $2,500. First place takes $1,250 plus a feature in the Devpost newsletter and on Devpost's socials. Everyone who submits an eligible project gets a Devpost Learn badge.

Get started

You'll need Node.js and Git installed, a coding agent that supports skills, and an empty folder for your project.

1. In your empty project folder, run npx skills add challengepost/learn-ai-basics --all -y
2. Open your coding agent in that folder and say "run 1-start." It takes it from there.
3. Join the Devpost Discord for questions, office hours, and other builders' projects.
4. Register for the Live Build Session, Thursday, Oct 1 at 1:00 pm ET, where we run the whole process start to finish. Recorded if you can't make it.
5. Register for Will It Ship, Thursday, Oct 22 at 3:00 pm ET. A live review of about five submissions against the judging criteria, before the deadline, so you can still act on what you hear. Submit early to the Devpost Discord's Build with AI Basics forum if you want yours in the mix.

Stuck? Ask in Discord or come to Cup of Joe office hours (Tuesdays Oct 6 and Oct 13, 3:00 pm ET, Discord voice). Setup help and all event details are on the Resources tab.

What to build

A new app, built with the Devpost Learn Skill Pack. The skills will help you find an idea if you don't have one, and cut it down if you have too much of one.

Three requirements, all checked at submission:

• New project, started from an empty folder during the submission period. Old ideas are fine, old code is not.
• Built with the skills. Run them in your coding agent.
• Planning docs in the repo. Your public repository must include the scope.md, prd.md, and spec.md files the skills generate.

• Design
  Does the project deliver a complete, coherent product experience — not just a technical proof of concept?
• Innovation/Idea
  How creative and novel is the concept and does the project differ from existing concepts?
• Presentation
  Does the video clearly demonstrate the project working end-to-end? Does the pitch communicate what problem is solved, who it's for, and why it matters? Is the overall presentation easy to follow?