The Symfony AI & MCP Hackathon is under way, and two things that were missing on day one are now live on the site: the people who will judge it, and what the top three teams take home.
The jury
Four experts across three seats, and we are grateful to all of them for giving the time:
- 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
They will try your project, watch your video and read your code. Which is worth keeping in mind: a repository a judge can clone and run counts for a great deal more than a polished description of one.
The prizes
For the top four teams:
- 1st — Robot Dog Bittle, A Programmable Robot Pet, from Private Packagist
- 2st — SymfonyCon 2027 VIP Ticket, or a Symfony Certification Voucher, from Symfony
- 3rd — Retro Radio, LEGO® Icons #10334, from SensioLabs
- 4th — Smart Pixel Clock, plus a Sulu hoodie, backpack & more, from Sulu
For each of the top three teams One JetBrains All Products Pack license for a year, from JetBrains. And every participant can claim $20 of Inference Providers credits from Hugging Face to prototype with the models on the Hub.
Thank you to all of them, for backing a hackathon whose entire purpose is to find out what is still broken.
How it ends
Submissions close on 22 November 2026 at 18:00 CET. A public repository anyone can clone and run, and a 90-second video of the real thing — that is the whole deliverable, and you can keep editing until the deadline.
The winners are announced on stage at SymfonyCon Warsaw, four days later on 26–27 November, and here on the blog straight afterwards.
Everything — the full jury, the prize details and the brief — is at symfony.com/hackathon. There is still time to start something.