The first Caffeine.ai Hackathon took place on 15 July 2025 at Dogpatch Studios in San Francisco, showcasing a radically simplified way of building software: just speak your idea into existence. Powered by DFINITY and built on the Internet Computer blockchain, Caffeine.ai offers a new interface for development where anyone, technical or not, can build, deploy and monetise fully functional applications through natural language alone.
Hosted as part of the Hello, Self-Writing Internet event, the hackathon invited 100 participants across two tracks. One track focused on developers and the other on non-developers. Each was capped at 50 people, with builders competing for a share of 90,000 dollars worth of ICP tokens. First, second and third place winners in each track received 25,000, 15,000 and 7,500 dollars respectively.
The day began with a keynote from DFINITY founder Dominic Williams, who presented Caffeine as a way to unlock software creation for everyone, without compromising ownership or data integrity. “The paradigm shift is this,” he told the crowd. “Anyone can now build apps just by talking to an AI.” He went on to demonstrate this live on stage, creating three working applications: a blog, a photo gallery and a task manager. Notably, Williams upgraded each app during the session without losing existing user data, showing how Caffeine maintains data persistence across changes.
Later, Williams returned to the stage to introduce the Caffeine App Market, a new feature that will allow users to monetise the applications they create. In another live demo, he built a complete ecommerce site for a golf shop, integrating Stripe payments and full product management. All of it was constructed using simple, natural language prompts. No manual coding was needed.
The experience pods opened early in the day and drew a steady stream of attendees eager to try Caffeine for themselves. Within minutes, people were typing out prompts and watching their ideas take form. From invoicing workflows to job tracking tools, apps were being built in real time by users who in many cases had no technical background.
The platform itself is built on the Internet Computer which means that every application is decentralised, tamperproof and fully owned by its creator. This approach to infrastructure, where user data is not stored on third party servers, was a recurring theme throughout the event. The emphasis on sovereignty and control was echoed again during the closing fireside chat on AI governance and safety.
One of the standout discussions was titled AI Scaling as an Engine of Innovation and Growth, moderated by Colm Woods. The panel included Will Stranzl from Anthropic and Pierre Samaties from DFINITY. The conversation focused on Caffeine’s mission to make app creation accessible to all, while ensuring the underlying infrastructure remains secure and user controlled. As one speaker put it, the aim is to “empower everyone on this planet to become a builder just by talking, but at the same time, also give them the security that their software runs on an infrastructure that they can control.”
In the competition itself, projects from both the technical and non-technical tracks showed what is now possible when AI is used as a direct building interface. On the technical side, Road Patrol took first prize. It allows citizens to report infrastructure issues such as potholes and broken street lights using a map-based interface. Second place went to K, which scans AI-generated apps for potential vulnerabilities. SkillSprout came in third with its gamified learning platform that encourages skill development through points and achievements.
In the non-technical track, the top prize was awarded to BlueLens, a public health tool that monitors the safety of drinking water using real time analytics and an AI powered chat assistant. Will Maker earned second place with an app that generates legal documents such as wills and healthcare directives for California residents. DentalTracks placed third, offering users a way to securely store and manage all their dental records in one private location.
Alongside the building and judging, a panel featuring Jan Camenisch from DFINITY, Alex Fowler from Nexus and Adnan Dakhwe from DelphinusCyber addressed topics around decentralised security, user sovereignty and the ethical dimensions of AI-driven software. A key takeaway was that AI blurs the line between user and developer, enabling people to take meaningful action in ways that were previously impossible.
By the time the awards were announced in the early evening, it had become clear that participants had created tools with real world relevance. And while the hackathon format condensed everything into a single day, the platform itself is designed for long term use. Users who join now can begin building apps, listing them on the market and maintaining full ownership from day one.
Caffeine.ai brings together AI powered development, blockchain based infrastructure and a marketplace model in one integrated experience. It simplifies the act of creation while protecting the things that matter most: data, privacy and ownership. For many attendees, the biggest surprise was not the technology itself, but how quickly it allowed them to move from idea to working product.
Early access to the platform is now open. Invite codes will be distributed on a rolling basis, and users are encouraged to register interest at https://caffeine.ai. With the platform’s tools now publicly demonstrated and its first builders already shipping, Caffeine is preparing to support a growing wave of creators who do not need any coding experience to get started.
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