---
type: source
title: "The Kiro AI Coding Hackathon has Officially Started! Build ANYTHING, Win Big Prizes."
description: "Cole announces the Dynamous x Kiro AI coding hackathon ($17K prize pool), explaining how to register, submit, and get started building any application with the Kiro coding agent."
youtube_id: O8KI2paEBbM
url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8KI2paEBbM
slug: the-kiro-ai-coding-hackathon-has-officially-started-build-anything-win-big-prizes
published: 2026-01-05
duration: "0:08:29"
recency_rank: 45
raw: "../raw/the-kiro-ai-coding-hackathon-has-officially-started-build-anything-win-big-prizes.md"
tags: [kiro, hackathon, agentic-coding, dynamous]
created: 2026-07-21
updated: 2026-07-21
---

This is a launch and announcement video for a joint Dynamous and Kiro AI coding hackathon running January 5 to January 23, 2026, with a $17,000 prize pool and winners announced on a February 7 livestream. Cole walks through the mechanics: register for free via the public Kiro Hackathon section of the Dynamous community, claim free Kiro credits (a new account gets 500 bonus credits usable within 30 days), and build any kind of project (web apps, AI agents, CLI tools, APIs, automation, mobile) with the only hard requirement being that you use Kiro.

Beyond logistics, the video surfaces how Kiro structures agentic coding and what a submission must document. Submissions are judged on application quality, how well you used Kiro (CLI preferred over IDE), documentation quality, innovation, and a 2 to 5 minute demo video. Critically, Cole asks entrants to show their AI coding process, not just the finished product: steering documents (Kiro's term for global rules), prompts and commands (workflows defined in markdown), and a devlog capturing timeline, decisions, and challenges.

He closes by pointing to a GitHub quick-start template he built to lower the barrier to entry. It ships a Kiro guide markdown (what makes Kiro different, install per-OS, core concepts like the .kiro folder, tangent mode, cross-session knowledge management, subagents, MCP servers), a quick-start command that interviews you to define your steering documents, and a set of prebuilt workflow commands modeling an example development workflow.

## Concepts covered

- [Global Rules](../concepts/global-rules.md)
- [Slash Commands](../concepts/slash-commands.md)
- [Agentic Coding](../concepts/agentic-coding.md)

## Entities

- [Kiro](../entities/tools/kiro.md)
- [Dynamous](../entities/organizations/dynamous.md)
- [GitHub](../entities/tools/github.md)
- [Cole Medin](../entities/people/cole-medin.md)

## Key moments

- **[0:00:00]** Announces the Dynamous x Kiro hackathon and $17,000 prize pool
- **[0:00:51]** Timeline: starts Jan 5, submissions until Jan 23, winners announced on a Feb 7 livestream
- **[0:02:03]** Free credits: a new Kiro account gets 500 bonus credits usable within 30 days
- **[0:02:51]** What you can build: only requirement is using Kiro; theme is open (web apps, AI agents, CLI tools, APIs, automation, mobile)
- **[0:03:39]** Judging criteria: app quality, how well you used Kiro, documentation, innovation, presentation/demo video
- **[0:04:33]** Required documentation: steering documents (global rules), prompts/commands, and a devlog of the dev journey
- **[0:05:27]** Rules: individual only, one final submission; submit via zip or public GitHub repo plus a demo video
- **[0:05:53]** Quick-start GitHub template that clones locally with a Kiro guide and workflow commands

## Transcript

[Raw transcript](../raw/the-kiro-ai-coding-hackathon-has-officially-started-build-anything-win-big-prizes.md)
