Symfony AI Symfony AI & MCP Hackathon
Oct 26 – Nov 22, 2026· Online· Free· Solo or team of two· Symfony AI & PHP MCP SDK 1.0.0 pre-release

Make PHP think.

Four weeks to push Symfony AI and the official PHP MCP SDK as far as they go — LLMs, agents, RAG, MCP servers and clients.

Submit your project Browse projects
23
Days
11
Hours
43
Minutes
57
Seconds · until submissions close
22 hackers · 22 teams in
FP Force Push @ 2AM solo O Odiseo solo D Demokratis solo AA Archive Alchemy solo TH Team Hatfield solo NO Night Owl solo V Void solo SR Shiny Red Apples solo S Slopmower solo O Ombu solo TF Team Freelygive solo F FivePaths solo S SaveMyPlant solo S SeriousDesign solo J jisa7 solo LT LuK team solo DB Deny by Default solo S Sadiqk2 solo TD Team Daan solo S Synapse solo Z Zambo solo A Arkonium solo FP Force Push @ 2AM solo O Odiseo solo D Demokratis solo AA Archive Alchemy solo TH Team Hatfield solo NO Night Owl solo V Void solo SR Shiny Red Apples solo S Slopmower solo O Ombu solo TF Team Freelygive solo F FivePaths solo S SaveMyPlant solo S SeriousDesign solo J jisa7 solo LT LuK team solo DB Deny by Default solo S Sadiqk2 solo TD Team Daan solo S Synapse solo Z Zambo solo A Arkonium solo

What the jury looks for

No fixed topics, and no point building for the jury. Show what Symfony AI and MCP let you do that you could not do before.

01
A creative idea

Something surprising, useful or just fun — more than another chatbot. Build what you would want to exist, not what you think the jury wants to see.

02
It actually works

A real, working demo, not a concept of what it could do one day. Bonus if a juror can clone the repository and run it themselves.

03
What it unlocked

What did Symfony AI and the PHP MCP SDK let you do that you could not do before? Use the components and the protocol in ways nobody expected.

04
Craft

Code you would merge: idiomatic Symfony, typed, tested where it counts, and a README that gets a stranger from git clone to a running demo in five minutes.

Pre-release

Break it before 1.0.0 ships.

This hackathon runs on the Symfony AI 1.0.0 pre-release — including the official PHP MCP SDK (mcp/sdk), which is heading for 1.0 right alongside it. Four weeks of people building real things is the hardest they have ever been pushed — and that is the point.

So when something breaks, misbehaves, or simply reads wrong at three in the morning: that is a result, not a detour. A reproduction from a real project is worth more than any amount of testing in a vacuum — and what gets reported now is what 1.0.0 ships without.

Hit a bug in Symfony AI?
github.com/symfony/ai/issues
Open an issue →
Hit a bug in PHP MCP SDK?
github.com/modelcontextprotocol/php-sdk/issues
Open an issue →

The jury

Our four expert judges will try your project, watch your video and read your code — win them over with a creative idea and solid engineering.

David Soria Parra & Den Delimarsky
MCP Co-Creator & Lead Maintainer
Members of Technical Staff at Anthropic
Nico Martin
Machine Learning Engineer at Hugging Face
Google Developer Expert in AI and web technologies
Brent Roose
Board member at The PHP Foundation
Developer Advocate for PHP at JetBrains

The prizes

The top four teams each take home a prize.

1st place: Robot Dog Bittle Robot Dog Bittle A Programmable Robot Pet Sponsored by
2nd place: SymfonyCon 2027 VIP Ticket SymfonyCon 2027 VIP Ticket or Symfony Certification Voucher Sponsored by
3rd place: Retro Radio Retro Radio LEGO® Icons #10334 Sponsored by
4th place: Smart Pixel Clock Smart Pixel Clock + Sulu Hoodie, Backpack & more Sponsored by
For each of the top three teams One JetBrains All Products Pack license for a year On top of its prize — every JetBrains IDE, PhpStorm included. For every developer $20 of Hugging Face inference credits Prototype with the models on the Hub through Inference Providers — your coupon waits on your team page.

The brief

Stack
Symfony AI — any provider, any store — and the PHP MCP SDK (mcp/sdk) for MCP servers and clients. Tag what you use — RAG, MCP, Deep Research or your own.
Credits
Use Hugging Face Inference Providers in your project — Hugging Face sponsors a $20 coupon per developer for prototyping.
Team
Solo or in a pair. Sign in with SymfonyConnect, share an invite code.
Feedback
Running on the Symfony AI 1.0.0 pre-release, incl. the PHP MCP SDK — file what breaks at github.com/symfony/ai/issues or github.com/modelcontextprotocol/php-sdk/issues.
Deliverable
A public repository anyone can clone and run, and a 90-second video of the real thing, before Nov 22 · 18:00 CET.

Sponsors

Ship it by
November 22.

Submit your project