Hacktoberfest is now about building with open-weight models, not counting PRs

Swift (CEO & Co-Founder of MLH + DEV) here. We fully took over running Hacktoberfest this year (DigitalOcean is still the presenting partner).

For 12 years Hacktoberfest was 4x PRs for a t-shirt. That got a lot of people their first merged PR, but it also made October the toughest month of the year to be a maintainer. With the rise of coding agents, making that first PR is no longer the biggest challenge in Open Source anyway, so we decided to refocus the event on what matters now.

Instead, the whole month is about building with "Open AI" (not the company!) like open-weight models, Open Source harnesses, and other freely available agentic tools and skills. Some of what's on the schedule: coding with a local model and no wifi, building an agent harness from scratch, writing+publishing your first skill, and running an open-weight model entirely on an Arduino.

We're live streaming nearly every day and there are already 400+ local in-person "Fests" where you can get together with other builders to participate in Hacktoberfest. Happy hacking!

If you don't see a Fest in your city, consider hosting one of your own! Applications are still opening for Hack Days and Meetups happening later in the month: https://hacktoberfest.com/host