Artificial intelligence is transforming hackathons. A new competition format has emerged where AI agents, rather than human participants, work through the night to create products for evaluation. It's called "Ralphton." As startup founders and developers embrace this format, industry observers predict the solo-entrepreneur market leveraging AI agents will grow faster than expected.
According to industry sources on June 4, developer community Team Attention partnered with Kakao Ventures to host "Ralphton" from May 28 to June 1 in Seongbuk-gu, Seoul. Ralphton is a hackathon concept where humans go home and AI does the coding. Unlike traditional hackathons where participants write code themselves for evaluation, contestants in this competition only present ideas and blueprints. AI agents handle the actual coding overnight. Judges evaluate the completed results the following day.
Nine teams of startup developers and founders advanced to the finals after preliminary rounds. Kim Woo-young, who runs an AI agent startup, developed a transposition service that analyzes sheet music PDFs and automatically changes keys using AI agents. Hwang Sung-hyun, co-founder of Banksalad and tech lead at The Ventures, submitted a large language model-based puzzle web application created by his AI agent.
First place went to a team that developed a household chore automation bot based on fixed-camera video. The team never touched their keyboards during the allotted time. Instead, they had AI agents write 100,000 lines of code. Seventy percent of the AI-generated code was for testing. Notably, the team ran 133 rounds of Q&A between AI agents before development to reduce design errors and ambiguities. This preemptively blocked false reporting that can occur when using multiple AI agents.
"In the past, solo developers faced clear limitations in scaling their businesses, but this Ralphton confirmed that barrier has completely collapsed," said Jang Dong-wook, director at Kakao Ventures. "We now need to meet 'founders with entirely new profiles' that are completely different from what we knew before."
Jeong Gu-bong, a developer at Team Attention, added: "Through this Ralphton, I learned that beyond using AI as a tool, how deeply companies internalize AI agent utilization will become their true moat."
The event was sponsored by global tech giant OpenAI. Developers from OpenAI's Singapore office attended in person.