The organiser asks their AI agent to set up an event. It creates a server on their own cloud account, gives it a web address, installs everything and issues a key to each participant. Nobody opens a terminal.
Participants build with the agent they already use. Every entry is a live link on the organiser's own machine.
A company where few people write code for a living but most have Claude Code, Codex, Cursor or Copilot. A college class. A team offsite. Any group whose members have not deployed a website before.
A participant needs a browser and an agent that can run a skill. The organiser needs a cloud account and about an hour of patience the first time.
Installs the Run Hackathon skill and asks their agent to set up an event. The agent does the rest and reports back.
Smallest Ubuntu plan on the organiser's own cloud account, paid by them. Tested end to end on UpCloud. Around five dollars a month, billed hourly, so a weekend event costs cents.
Two hostnames, created for them under a domain we run. Nothing to buy, no DNS to edit. They can use their own domain instead if they want their name on it. HTTPS certificates are obtained automatically.
Paste a roster or ask for a number, up to 200 at a time. Each participant gets a key. Download the list as a spreadsheet and hand them out however you already talk to people.
Ask the agent to tear it down. It deletes the server and removes the hostnames, so nothing keeps billing and no address is left pointing at a machine somebody else now owns.
Two hostnames rather than one is deliberate. Participant pages must never share a browser origin with the admin screen, or something a participant publishes could act on the dashboard of whoever is looking at it.
That prompt works in anything that can fetch a URL, so ChatGPT, Claude Code, Codex, Copilot, Cursor and terminal agents all do the same thing. Each participant can hold 100 sites and can pick their own address until they publish.
The organiser gets one screen listing every entry with its link, filterable, copyable and downloadable as a spreadsheet. That is the list you hand to judges.
Each participant sees their own traffic, split into people, bots and monitoring, so they can tell whether anyone actually looked.
Backups are the provider's. Every host on the list will back the whole machine up on a schedule for around a fifth of the server price. Turn it on when you create the server, before anyone has built anything worth losing.
Everyone can take their work with them. A participant downloads their site as one archive at any time, files and saved data together, without asking the organiser. Nothing is stranded when the server is deleted.
Saved data is open. Anyone who can load a page can change that site's stored data. The files themselves change only with the owner's key. If saved data matters for judging, have each team take a copy before judging starts.
Say what is missing before the event, not during it.
| Scoring and ranking | You get the list of entries and their links. There is nothing to score them with, tag them by, or rank them in. Judges use whatever they already use. |
| Teams | An account is one person. A team shares one key, or each member publishes separately and you decide which link is the entry. |
| Oracle's free tier Untested | Their always-free tier would make the server cost nothing, and the software already runs on that architecture. The setup path is written but has not been run end to end. |
| AI inside the pages | No per-site model allowance. A page that calls a model needs a key from somewhere, and anything in the page is public. |
Sign-in is not on this list. Participants use a key on purpose: a free email tier caps at a hundred messages a day, which a hundred people exhaust before lunch, and Google wants a client registered for every hostname. A key needs no provider, no delivery and no waiting. Emailed codes and Google can still be added on an instance whose domain the organiser controls.
Try it as a participant first, on simple-host.app, which runs the same software and is free. Sign in, install the skill, ask your agent for a page. Then install the hackathon skill and set up an event of your own.
Install the skill Source on GitHub For companies
I am Vineet Sriram. Everything described here has been run end to end on a real server, from creating it to destroying it.