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Building the Future of IDEs: Inside the First JetBrains Codex Hackathon
39 projects, 6 finalists, and a weekend of IDE-native AI in San Francisco.
Earlier this month, we brought developers together in San Francisco for the inaugural JetBrains x Codex Hackathon. Over the course of one weekend, teams built 39 IDE-native AI projects, from which six finalists emerged. The event highlighted just how rapidly developers are transforming AI within the IDE into sophisticated workflows, tools, and products.
Why it matters
AI in the IDE is a vibrant conversation in software right now. From agents and copilots to context windows and orchestration, developers are brimming with ideas about where this is all heading. A hackathon remains one of the best formats for channeling that energy into working code, giving people the space to pursue ambitious projects within a weekend window.
The response was immense: 443 developers applied, resulting in 39 completed projects. Roughly half were IDE plugins or tools built on the IntelliJ Platform SDK – the kind of work that directly shapes the future of how engineering teams build. JetBrains believes in the power of convening a room like this, fueled by working tools and a real deadline. Leading technologists gave up their Sunday to judge, because the conversations and innovations that took place in that room were worth showing up for.
What got built
The weekend’s top prize went to hyperreasoning, a solo build by Aditya Mangalampalli. One person, one laptop, 24 hours – and a coding agent that decides which reasoning paths are worth exploring before it generates a single line of code. It’s the kind of project that justifies the hackathon format: a dormant idea finally prototyped by someone with the conviction to see it through solo over the course of a weekend. We’ll share the full story in a follow-up blog post.
Second place went to Scopecreep (Bhavik Sheoran, Kenneth Ross, Roman Javadyan, and Joon Im). Third place went to mesh-code (Ayush Ojha, Coco Cao, Kush Ise, and AL DRAM). Both teams, along with our three other finalists, will get their own spotlights in the next blog post.
Zooming out from individual projects, a few things stood out across the finalist pool. Roughly half the submissions were JetBrains plugins or IDE-native tools, built directly against the IntelliJ Platform SDK rather than around it. Two of our six finalists were solo builders – a remarkable feat in a format that usually rewards more hands. The work that impressed the judges wasn’t necessarily the work that generated code the fastest; it was the work that gave developers more visibility into what their agents were doing, more guardrails around it, and a clearer sense of when to trust the output.
That last part matters. Speed makes for good demos, but the projects people in the room kept coming back to were those building toward something that lasts past the demo: correctness, safety, context, and review. Better, not just faster.
“The most valuable part was building directly against the IDE rather than around it.”
Participant feedback
The partners who made it possible
A weekend like this only happens when the entire ecosystem shows up. OpenAI brought Codex to the heart of the event, sent a judge, and gave every attendee ChatGPT Pro credits. Cerebral Valley managed the experience seamlessly from start to finish. AuthZed contributed two judges and provided cloud credits for every builder in the room.
Nebius sent a judge and backed the winning team, while Supabase and BKey each sent judges and anchored key layers of the tech stack. Clerk and Vercel joined as community partners, and Shack15 hosted us. A stack that tight is precisely what allows a two-person team to ship something production-looking by Sunday night.
