Celebrating the builders, dreamers, and vibe-coders pushing the frontier of human + AI creation. Every great tool, game, and agent started with one person and a prompt.
Click any award to see full criteria and what it takes to win. Nominations are open to anyone building with AI.
Grand Prize👑
The Prometheus Award — Best Overall AI Project
The highest honor. One project per year. The one build that made everyone stop and say “how did they do that?”
Significant technical ambition — not just a wrapper
Demonstrated real-world impact or viral community response
Strong human-AI collaboration in the build process itself
Open to any category: app, game, agent, tool, or creative work
Judged on originality, execution, and audacity
Gold⚡
Best Vibe Coded App
Built fast, shipped faster. The award for apps that came to life through pure flow state and AI assistance.
Primarily built using AI coding tools (Cursor, GitHub Copilot, Claude Code, Codex, etc.)
Functional, deployed, and usable by real people
Bonus: shipped in under 72 hours or as a solo build
Code quality matters less than creative vision and usability
Should demonstrate the "what if I just built it?" mindset
Gold🎮
Best Vibe Coded Game
Games born from a single prompt and a lot of iteration. Playable, fun, and improbably well-made given how it was built.
A playable game (browser, mobile, desktop — any platform)
Built with significant AI assistance in coding and/or art generation
Must be completable or have a clear gameplay loop
Judged on fun factor, creativity, and how AI-native the build process was
Bonus: generative elements, AI NPCs, or AI-driven narrative
Gold🔌
Best AI API Integration
The award for developers who found the most creative or technically impressive use of an AI API.
Must use at least one AI API (OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, Replicate, ElevenLabs, etc.)
Integration should go beyond simple text generation — think multi-modal, agentic, or deeply embedded
Should solve a real problem or enable something previously impossible
Bonus: chaining multiple APIs in a novel workflow
Open source submissions get extra consideration
Gold🤖
Best AI Agent Build
Not just a chatbot. An actual autonomous agent that plans, acts, and gets things done without holding your hand.
Agent must demonstrate autonomous multi-step reasoning
Uses tools, APIs, or file systems — not just conversation
Clear task definition with measurable outcomes
Bonus: persistent memory, self-correction, or multi-agent coordination
Should be documented well enough that others can understand the architecture
Gold🦸
Best Solo Dev Build
One person. One idea. AI as co-pilot. The award for indie builders who shipped something that felt like a team made it.
Single developer, no external team
AI tools used for coding, design, content, or all three
Must be a complete, deployable product (not a prototype)
Judged on scope vs. resources — what you built relative to working alone
Bonus: production users, revenue, or open source community adoption
Silver🌐
Best Open Source AI Tool
Built for the community, not the cap table. The award for open source AI tools that genuinely improve how developers work.
Must be open source (GitHub, GitLab, or equivalent)
Actively maintained with clear documentation
Enables other developers to build AI-powered things more easily
Community adoption measured by stars, forks, or real-world deployments
Bonus: meaningful contributor community beyond the original author
Silver🎨
Best Creative AI Project
Art, music, video, writing — creative work where AI was a genuine collaborator, not just a filter.
Any creative medium: visual art, music, writing, film, interactive experience
AI must be a significant creative collaborator — not just upscaling or autocomplete
Should demonstrate a unique creative vision, not generic AI output
Bonus: novel workflows, custom model fine-tuning, or entirely new creative forms
Judged on artistic merit and creative use of AI capabilities
Silver📝
Best Prompt Engineering
The underrated craft. For the developer whose system prompts, chains, and few-shot examples turned a good model into a great product.
Must demonstrate a specific prompting technique or system with clear impact
Could be a system prompt, a chain-of-thought framework, or a retrieval strategy
Results must be reproducible and measurable
Bonus: published prompt library, open methodology, or novel technique
Judged on cleverness, reliability, and impact on output quality
Silver🚀
Best AI-Powered SaaS
For the builders who didn’t just ship — they charged for it. AI at the core, real customers, real revenue.
Live product with paying customers or significant free-tier adoption
AI is a core feature, not a marketing label
Must demonstrate genuine user value (testimonials, retention, or usage data)
Bonus: bootstrapped, solo-founded, or built without significant funding
Judged on product-market fit and the quality of the AI integration
Silver🔧
Best Hardware + AI Build
When AI leaves the browser. Raspberry Pi, Arduino, robots, wearables — anything that runs AI in the physical world.
Physical device with AI capabilities (local or cloud-connected)
Must be a real, working prototype — not a render
Bonus: local inference, edge AI, or novel sensor/AI integration
Judged on creativity, functionality, and the difficulty of the hardware/software integration
Home automation, robots, wearables, and art installations all welcome
Special💙
Best AI for Good
For the project that used AI to solve a real human problem — health, education, accessibility, environment, or community.
Addresses a genuine social, health, educational, or environmental challenge
Must have real users who benefit from the tool
Commercial viability is fine — the mission still has to be real
Judged on impact, reach, and whether AI was essential to the solution
Accessibility tools and mental health applications especially encouraged
Special🤪
Most Unhinged AI Experiment
The award for the build that made the judges say “why did you make this?” in the best possible way.
Must be genuinely, delightfully weird
Should work as intended (the unhinged part is the intent)
Humor, absurdity, and "hold on let me show you this" energy required
Bonus: went viral for being bizarre, or spawned a community of equally unhinged clones
Judged entirely on chaotic creative energy
Special🔥
The Comeback Build Award
For the developer who failed publicly, learned, and shipped something better. Resilience over polish.
A documented "failed" previous version or abandoned project
The new build must use AI in a meaningfully different way
Must be live and usable
Judged on the quality of the lesson learned and the quality of the comeback
Self-nominations encouraged — own the failure story
Special📚
Best AI Build Documented
The award for the developer who built something great AND showed their work. The community thanks you.
A blog post, video series, GitHub README, or tutorial documenting the full build process
Must include prompts, architecture decisions, and failures (not just the highlight reel)
Should be genuinely useful to other builders
Bonus: reproducible — someone else can follow along and build it themselves
Judged on thoroughness, honesty, and educational value
Special⭐
Rookie of the Year
For the first-time AI builder who shipped something that made veterans do a double-take. Beginner’s mind, expert results.
Nominator must confirm this is the developer’s first publicly shipped AI project
Must be complete and deployed
Judged on the gap between experience level and output quality
Bonus: built with no formal CS background, or completed a career change project
The award honors the beginning — not the polish
The Process
How It Works
Simple, transparent, and built for builders — not bureaucracy.
1
Submit Your Nomination
Fill out the nomination form with a link to your project, a brief description, and which category you're entering. Self-nominations are not only allowed — they're encouraged. You built it. Own it.
2
Community Voting Opens
All submissions enter a public voting phase. The community reviews builds, watches demos, reads the write-ups, and votes for their favorites in each category.
3
Panel Review
A panel of AI developers, builders, and community members reviews the top-voted submissions in each category. Criteria-based scoring alongside community votes determines finalists.
4
Winners Announced
Winners are announced at the annual AI Dev Awards ceremony — streamed live. Each winner gets a digital trophy, a permanent page on this site, and the kind of social proof that actually means something to other builders.
🌟
Ready to Nominate?
Nominations are open for the 2026 season. Whether it's your own build or someone else's that deserves recognition — this is the place to put it on record.
