Season 1 · four rounds
Weekly competition.
Any AI. One file. 90 minutes.
We rank the human.
A weekly vibe-coding competition. Every Saturday a build task drops. You get 90 minutes and any AI tool you like. Entries are judged head-to-head — you earn a rating that carries across rounds, and every winning run is published with its full prompt transcript.
How it works
01
The task drops
Saturday 17:00 CET, the task goes live for everyone at once. It's always a small, complete app — secret until the clock starts. You have 90 minutes, any AI tool, any model.
02
You ship one file
The deliverable is a single self-contained HTML file — no builds, no servers, no network calls. You submit the file plus your session transcript on the submission page, which unlocks when the window opens.
03
Head-to-head judging
Every submission passes a functional smoke test, then survivors are compared pairwise against the round's rubric. Results feed an Elo-style rating. Monday: leaderboard, full gallery, and the winner's annotated replay.
Season 1 schedule
Rules
▸
Any AI tool is allowed — Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot, Windsurf, raw API, anything. You declare what you used. The tool isn't ranked; you are.
▸
One self-contained HTML file. It must work opened from disk with the network off. No external scripts, fonts, or API calls.
▸
The window is the window. 90 minutes from drop, enforced by submission timestamp. Late is out, no exceptions — same clock for everyone.
▸
Transcript required. Your full session export (or a screen recording) comes with the entry. No transcript, no entry. Top finishers' transcripts are audited before results publish.
▸
One seat covers the whole season. Play every round or just the ones you can make — your rating is built from the rounds you play. One entry per person per round.
▸
Verified account, public nickname. You hold your seat with a Google or GitHub sign-in that stays private — no anonymous or throwaway-email entries. Only your chosen nickname is ever shown.
▸
Don't game the judge. Judging is done through the running app only. Any text in a submission addressed to a judge or AI — visible or hidden — is disqualification for the round.
▸
Your work stays yours. By entering you let us publish your submission and transcript in the round gallery — that's the point of the ladder. Copyright remains with you.
▸
No prizes in Season 1 — deliberately. The rating, the badge, and the published replay are the prize. Sponsored seasons come later if this deserves to exist.
FAQ
What kind of tasks?
Small, complete apps — the kind of thing vibe coding is actually for. Buildable to "working" in about an hour, with headroom above that where skill shows. Each task ships with a public functional checklist after the round, so you can see exactly what was graded.
Why record my prompts?
Two reasons. It's the anti-cheat — proof a human drove the session inside the window. And it's the content: the most interesting thing about a winning entry is how it was prompted. Winning replays get published and annotated.
How exactly is judging done?
Step one is a mechanical 5-item smoke test — does the core work. Survivors go into Swiss-style pairwise comparisons: an LLM judge uses both running apps side by side against the round rubric (functional depth, UX, robustness, ambition), with human spot-checks and a manual audit of the top five. Ratings are a Bradley-Terry fit over all pairwise results.
Can I enter with no coding experience?
Yes — that's the experiment. The ladder measures how well you direct an AI, not how much syntax you know. Smoke-test survival is a real achievement in round one.
Why is there no prize money?
Deliberately, for Season 1. Self-motivation is the best filter — the field we want is the one that shows up for the rating and the published replay, not a payout. Sponsorship starts from Round 2, credits before cash, and only once Round 1's results are public. See the sponsors page.
What if I can't make a Saturday?
No problem. Your seat is good for the whole season — skip any round and join the next one with the same seat. The rating is built from the rounds you actually play, so missing a week costs you nothing except that week's results.
Why do I sign in with Google or GitHub?
To hold your seat and stop duplicate or throwaway entries — seats are limited and one-per-person only works with a verified account. The login is never displayed or shared; your nickname is the only public identity.
Who runs this?
One person, openly. Season 1 is judged semi-manually and the whole method is published with the results. If the season proves out, the pipeline gets automated and the ladder becomes permanent.