The Symfony AI & MCP Hackathon is well under way, with around 50 teams building and submissions open until 22 November. Three things have changed since we started.
Two more judges
- Florian Bauer — Member of Technical Staff at OpenAI
- Fabien Potencier — Founder and project lead at Symfony, CTO at Upsun
They join David Soria Parra and Den Delimarsky of Anthropic, Nico Martin of Hugging Face, and Brent Roose of The PHP Foundation and JetBrains. Thank you all for the time.
One more prize
Alongside the four podium places, Fabien and the Symfony Core Team will pick one project of their own: a €1,000 Upsun voucher, for Upsun Dispatch, Upsun Cloud or Blackfire, from Upsun.
It is a separate pick, so a project that does not land on the podium can still take it. Build the thing you actually want to exist.
Go and look at what people are making
This is the part worth your five minutes. Teams have been publishing as they go, and the projects page already has real entries — public repositories you can clone and run, and videos of the things actually working.
So go through them. Leave a reaction, leave a comment. A hackathon is more fun when people are watching, and a note on someone's project while they are still building is worth a great deal more than applause at the end. If something is clever, say so. If you cannot get it running, that is useful too.
Still time to start
Submissions close on 22 November 2026 at 18:00 CET — a public repository and a 90-second video. There is still time for something small and sharp, and a team of one is perfectly fine.
Everything is at symfony.com/hackathon. The winners are announced on stage at SymfonyCon Warsaw on 26–27 November, and here on the blog straight afterwards.