DEV Community: Jess Lee

Working on a silly project - share your favorite AI buzzwords/phrases and general key terms with me please!!

Jess Lee — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 14:21:14 +0000

Feel free to include any brands or product names as well. Be as obscure or on the nose as you'd like.

Thanks in advance, can't wait to share the project when it's done 😄

What was your win this week??

Jess Lee — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 06:00:00 +0000

👋👋👋👋
Looking back on your week -- what was something you're proud of?
All wins count -- big or small 🎉

Examples of 'wins' include:

Getting a promotion!
Starting a new project
Fixing a tricky bug
Actually remembered to eat lunch (a hero's journey)🧃

Happy Friday!

Congrats to the Hermes Agent Challenge Winners!

Jess Lee — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 22:13:44 +0000

We are thrilled to announce the winners of the Hermes Agent Challenge! Over the past few weeks, the DEV community dove headfirst into one of the most exciting open-source agentic systems on the scene, and the submissions absolutely delivered.

The range of what people built and wrote left us genuinely impressed — Hermes' memory architecture got a thorough cognitive-science breakdown, the cost curve of a self-improving agent got stress-tested in production, someone built a full immune system for stress-testing AI agent safety, and a Linux desktop HAL was shipped entirely by AI agents. These are just a few of the standout submissions that made judging genuinely hard.

Now, without further ado, let's celebrate our winners! 🎉

Build With Hermes Agent Winners 🏆

From an offline-first emergency response platform to a 25-agent legislative simulation, the Build submissions pushed Hermes into genuinely ambitious territory. What stood out across the board was how purposefully each project used Hermes' agentic capabilities — not as a wrapper around a chat model, but as the actual load-bearing infrastructure. Parallel task delegation, persistent memory, scheduled autonomy, and model-agnostic routing all showed up in real, working builds.

Hermes Agent Challenge Submission: Build With Hermes Agent

ujja

May 28

Building an Offline-First Bushfire Response Platform With Hermes Agent

#hermesagentchallenge #devchallenge #agents

14 min read

Hermes Agent Challenge Submission: Build With Hermes Agent

Monika Sadlok

May 30

I Built a 25-Agent Polish Parliament That Drafts Bills With Real Legal Citations

#hermesagentchallenge #devchallenge #agents

6 min read

Hermes Agent Challenge Submission: Build With Hermes Agent

Elliott

May 29

Skills are Prompts. Here's how Hermes Apprentice turns them into weights

#hermesagentchallenge #devchallenge #agents #ai

9 min read

Hermes Agent Challenge Submission: Build With Hermes Agent

Arqam Waheed

May 30

I Made My AI Models Argue, Then Let Hermes Be the Judge

#hermesagentchallenge #devchallenge #agents #ai

10 min read

Write About Hermes Agent Winners 🏆

The Write submissions gave us useful breakdowns and genuine perspective. The strongest pieces ranged from practical setup guides to sharp critical arguments — about the self-trust issue baked into Hermes' skill architecture, what persistent memory actually changes about the developer experience, and when local agents earn their complexity. Whether you're just getting started with Hermes or already running it in production, there's something here for you to sink your teeth into.

Hermes Agent Challenge Submission

MxGuru

May 19

Two Local-Agent Philosophies: Where Hermes Earns Its Design, and Where the Tradeoffs Invert

#hermesagentchallenge #devchallenge #agents

7 min read

Hermes Agent Challenge Submission: Write About Hermes Agent

Paimon

May 31

Nous Research Hermes Agent: Setup and Tutorial Guide

#hermesagentchallenge #devchallenge #agents

10 min read

Hermes Agent Challenge Submission

Simphiwe Twala

May 16

Building an Ambient Developer Daemon with Nous Hermes

#hermesagentchallenge #devchallenge #agents

12 min read

Hermes Agent Challenge Submission

Vishal Keerthan

May 18

The Self-Trust Problem in Hermes Agent's Skill Architecture

#hermesagentchallenge #devchallenge #agents #opensource

10 min read

Prizes

All eight winners will each receive:

$125 USD
DEV++ Membership
Exclusive DEV Badge

All participants with a valid submission will receive a completion badge.

What's Next?

Check out the June Solstice Game Jam happening now:

Themes of Pride, Juneteenth, and Alan Turing

Jess Lee for The DEV Team

Jun 3

Join the June Solstice Game Jam: $1,000 in prizes!

#devchallenge #gamechallenge #gamedev

241

103

4 min read

Thank you once more to everyone who participated.

Happy coding! 💙

Congrats to the Gemma 4 Challenge Winners!

Jess Lee — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 18:56:22 +0000

We are so excited to announce the winners of the Gemma 4 Challenge!

This is officially our most participated-in challenge to date, and the range of submissions made that obvious from the start. We saw a ten-year-old GPU-less laptop pushed to its limits, a $50-a-month OCR bill replaced by a local vision pipeline, disaster scenes compressed into 200-byte emergency payloads, and a phone that notices when an elder living alone needs help. The sheer array of topics and builds made these a joy to read through.

Now, let's cut to the chase and celebrate our winners!

🎉 Congratulations To…

Build With Gemma 4 Winners

This prompt asked builders to put Gemma 4 to work, and the range of what came back was the whole story.

We saw the model packed onto a disaster-relief app for the Philippines that keeps functioning when the cell towers go down, turned into a lanyard-worn pair of eyes for blind and low-vision users, and routed through a strict tool-dispatcher so a 2B model could safely tap and type on someone's behalf. One submission ran entirely peer-to-peer so no prompt ever touched a server, and another distilled a HIPAA-bound DBA's 3 AM database panic into a six-section runbook that never left their laptop.

Across all of it, these projects show Gemma 4 expanding the map what can be built and who gets to use it.

Gemma 4 Challenge: Build With Gemma 4 Submission

John Paul Curada

May 24

LIKAS: An offline disaster companion for the Philippines, powered by on-device Gemma 4 E2B

#devchallenge #gemmachallenge #gemma #ai

5 min read

Gemma 4 Challenge: Build With Gemma 4 Submission

Hassan Imam

May 24

AccessLens — A persistent on-device visual interpreter for the blind

#devchallenge #gemmachallenge #gemma

4 min read

Gemma 4 Challenge: Build With Gemma 4 Submission

AVINASH S KARANTH

May 22

p2p-ai — Distributed Peer-to-Peer AI Inference Network

#devchallenge #gemmachallenge #gemma

4 min read

Gemma 4 Challenge: Build With Gemma 4 Submission

Adebisi Mosimiloluwa

May 19

Genie: Building a Privacy-First Autonomous Agent That Controls Your Phone, Entirely Offline

#devchallenge #gemmachallenge #gemma

10 min read

Gemma 4 Challenge: Build With Gemma 4 Submission

Sireesha Chavvakula

May 25

I built a local Postgres triage co-pilot because HIPAA says I can't paste plans into ChatGPT or Claude

#devchallenge #gemmachallenge #postgres #ai

6 min read

Write About Gemma 4 Winners

The writing prompt covered just as much ground, from practical decision-making to deep architectural breakdowns to honest on-the-ground reporting.

One winner laid out exactly how to pick between Gemma 4's four variants before writing a single line of code, while another went under the hood of the model's vision system to explain how it compresses image patches into soft tokens. A third explored what an agentic Gemma 4 misinformation moderator for the Fediverse would actually have to contend with, a fourth shared the hard-won configuration tricks for getting real speed out of Gemma 4 E2B on Android, and the last took the open-model "catch-up" story to Freetown and tested it against the phones people actually carry.

Taken together, these posts are some of the most useful reference material the community has produced on Gemma 4 yet.

Gemma 4 Challenge: Write about Gemma 4 Submission

Soumyadeep Dey

May 23

Gemma 4 Has Four Variants. Here's How to Pick the Right One Before You Write a Single Line of Code.

#devchallenge #gemmachallenge #gemma

8 min read

Gemma 4 Challenge: Write about Gemma 4 Submission

Youdiowei Eteimorde

May 24

Gemma 4 Soft Tokens: The Rise and Fall of 16x16 Words ⚡👀

#devchallenge #gemmachallenge #gemma

20 min read

Gemma 4 Challenge: Write about Gemma 4 Submission

Connor Green

May 24

Anatomy of the Slopster

#devchallenge #gemmachallenge #gemma #java

18 min read

Gemma 4 Challenge: Write about Gemma 4 Submission

IBIYEMI Samuel O.

May 23

Gemma 4 on Android: Tricks for Faster On-Device Inference

#devchallenge #gemmachallenge #gemma #android

8 min read

Gemma 4 Challenge: Write about Gemma 4 Submission

ATMR

May 24

Open Models and the Sub-Saharan Region

#devchallenge #gemmachallenge #gemma #emergingmarkets

20 min read

Prizes

The five “Build with Gemma 4” winners will receive:

$500 USD cash prize
DEV++ Membership
Exclusive DEV Badge

The five “Write About Gemma 4” winners will receive:

$100 USD cash prize
DEV++ Membership
Exclusive DEV Badge

All participants with a valid submission will receive a completion badge on their DEV profile.

What's Next?

Check out the June Solstice Game Jam happening now:

Themes of Pride, Juneteenth, and Alan Turing

Jess Lee for The DEV Team

Jun 3

Join the June Solstice Game Jam: $1,000 in prizes!

#devchallenge #gamechallenge #gamedev

241

103

4 min read

Thank you again to everyone who participated.

See you next time 💜

What was your win this week?

Jess Lee — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 06:00:00 +0000

👋👋👋👋
Looking back on your week -- what was something you're proud of?
All wins count -- big or small 🎉

Examples of 'wins' include:

Getting a promotion!
Starting a new project
Fixing a tricky bug
Survived a meeting that could've been an email 📵

Happy Friday!

Congrats to the Google I/O 2026 Writing Challenge Winners!

Jess Lee — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 15:38:46 +0000

We are so excited to announce the winners of the Google I/O 2026 Writing Challenge!

We asked you to explore the announcements from Google I/O 2026 and share your thoughts and firsthand takes. Wow, you delivered. The quality and depth of submissions genuinely impressed our team. From hands-on walkthroughs to bold opinions on what the announcements really mean for developers, the entries were thoughtful, original, and packed with insight.

Thank you to everyone who participated. Your writing helps make this community one of the best places on the internet to learn what's actually happening in tech.

Now, let's celebrate our five winners! 🎉

🏆 Congratulations To…

Google I/O Writing Challenge Submission

Vrushali

May 24

The Sleeper Announcement from Google I/O 2026 That Will Change How We Think About Apps

#devchallenge #googleiochallenge #android #kotlin

7 min read

@vrushali_dev_15 wrote a standout deep-dive into AppFunctions — Android's new API for exposing app capabilities directly to AI agents. With 10 years of Android experience behind the lens, this post goes far beyond the surface announcement to map out the full architectural shift this signals and what developers should be thinking about right now, even before shipping a single AppFunction.

Google I/O Writing Challenge Submission

Vicente Junior

May 22

I gave Gemini 3.5 Flash a CVE-fix PR to review. It found another bug in the same file.

#googleiochallenge #devchallenge #ai #gemini

7 min read

@vicente_junior_dev did something rare: actually tested the thing. Running Gemini 3.5 Flash across 3 real production PRs, including a CVE fix, the post documents what the model caught. Grounded, honest, and exactly the kind of first-person experimentation we love to see.

Google I/O Writing Challenge Submission

Laurina Ayarah

May 24

Google Is Killing Gemini CLI on June 18. Here Is What to Do Before Then

#devchallenge #googleiochallenge

5 min read

@toboreeee gave developers a practical heads-up on something that could easily slip by: Gemini CLI deprecating on June 18. Rather than just reporting the news, the post walks readers through exactly what to do before the cutoff. Genuinely useful and well-timed.

Google I/O Writing Challenge Submission

S M Tahosin

May 21

The Most Underrated Announcement from Google I/O 2026 Was Buried in a 90-Second Demo

#discuss #googleiochallenge #devchallenge #python

6 min read

@tahosin spotted what most I/O coverage missed entirely: the Managed Agents API, buried in a 90-second demo. After two days of hands-on testing, the post delivers a clear-eyed breakdown of why this low-key announcement might matter more than all the Gemini headlines combined.

Google I/O Writing Challenge Submission

Rini Susan V S

May 24

Why Local AI Was the Real Winner of Google I/O 2026 (An Insider’s Take)

#devchallenge #googleiochallenge #googleio #edgeai

4 min read

@rinisvs made the case that through all the Gemini and cloud buzz, the real story of Google I/O 2026 was local AI. With an insider's perspective, this piece cuts through the hype and lays out why on-device intelligence may be the most consequential long-term thread running through the entire event.

Prizes

Each winner will receive:

$200 USD
DEV++ Membership
Exclusive DEV badge

All participants with a valid submission will receive a completion badge — keep an eye on your DEV profile!

What's Next?

Check out our current game challenge:

Themes of Pride, Juneteenth, and Alan Turing

Jess Lee for The DEV Team

Jun 3

Join the June Solstice Game Jam: $1,000 in prizes!

#devchallenge #gamechallenge #gamedev

241

100

4 min read

Happy Coding! 💚

Github "Finish-Up-A-Thon" Challenge Winner Announcement Delayed & General Challenge Timeline Updates

Jess Lee — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 22:21:49 +0000

Hey all, we have a quick update for everyone who participated in the GitHub "Finish-Up-A-Thon" Challenge, followed by a more general challenge timeline change.

First off — wow. Our recent challenges have really taken off, and the "Finish-Up-A-Thon" was no exception. The quality and volume of submissions have been incredible (we received over 500 submissions!), and we want to make sure our judges have the time to give every entry the thoughtful review it deserves.

As a result, we're pushing the winner announcement back to June 25. Thank you so much for your patience, and for putting so much heart into your builds. We can't wait to share the results!

Second, we know we've been updating the timelines for quite a few challenges. Here's our latest winner announcement timeline for those of you who have participated in the last few:

Google I/O 2026 Writing Challenge: June 11
Gemma 4 Challenge: June 18
Hermes Agent Challenge: June 18
GitHub "Finish-Up-A-Thon" Challenge: June 25
June Solstice Game Jam: July 9

Finally, we will be increasing the standard judging period for our challenges moving forward. Previously, we strived to select final challenge winners the week after submissions are due, but given our current pace of participation, we are now giving ourselves at least two full weeks so we don't run into these bottlenecks the future.

Thanks again for your participation. This is one of the best problems we could ever dream of having!

In the meantime, consider joining our game challenge — it's been a while since we've gotten to host one of these 😄

Themes of Pride, Juneteenth, and Alan Turing

Jess Lee for The DEV Team

Jun 3

Join the June Solstice Game Jam: $1,000 in prizes!

#devchallenge #gamechallenge #gamedev

182

4 min read

Happy coding! 💙

Winner Announcement Delayed for the Google I/O 2026 Writing Challenge

Jess Lee — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 16:45:54 +0000

Hey all, we have a quick update for everyone who participated in the Google I/O Writing Challenge.

We were thrilled by the number of posts that came in. Your takes on Google I/O 2026 were thoughtful, creative, and hard to rank. As a result, we need a bit more time to review all submissions before making our final decisions.

We'll be back with the winner announcement by June 11. Thank you so much for your patience, and for the effort you put into your writing.

In the meantime, consider entering one of our ongoing challenges:

Revive old projects using GitHub Copilot

Jess Lee for The DEV Team

May 21

Join the GitHub Finish-Up-A-Thon Challenge: $3,000 Prize Pool!

#githubchallenge #devchallenge #githubcopilot

750

104

3 min read

Themes of Pride, Juneteenth, and Alan Turing

Jess Lee for The DEV Team

Jun 3

Join the June Solstice Game Jam: $1,000 in prizes!

#devchallenge #gamechallenge #gamedev

125

4 min read

Join the June Solstice Game Jam: $1,000 in prizes!

Jess Lee — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 20:22:10 +0000

We're excited to kick off the June Solstice Game Jam, running from June 3 through June 21 and ending right on the solstice itself!

Whether you're in the northern hemisphere marking the longest day of the year or in the southern hemisphere observing the shortest, the solstice is a global moment of transition. June is also a profound month for identity, history and community in the U.S. and across the world.

We are celebrating authenticity and LGBTQIA+ history with Pride month, which also happens to be the birth month of Alan Turing – the famous computer scientist behind the “Turing Test” for artificial intelligence who was persecuted for being gay. June also marks Juneteenth, a day to celebrate an important milestone towards the freedom and liberation of Black Americans. It’s a time dedicated to reflection, honoring resilience, and amplifying Black joy.

But June isn't only about deep history! This month brings the electric teamwork and high stakes of the World Cup, bringing the entire planet together in the spirit of play. And if sports aren't your thing, June also serves up delightfully specific celebrations like International Sushi Day and National Flip-Flop Day.

Whether you want to build something deeply meaningful or delightfully goofy, this jam is your canvas. We’ve got some great prizes for five lucky winners.

Let's get to it.

Our Prompt

The June solstice arrives on June 21 — the longest day of the year for half the world, and the shortest for the other half. Build a game inspired by the solstice or any other June celebration: think Pride, Juneteenth, light and darkness, the passage of time, and anything else that comes to mind.

Our theme is intentionally broad to allow room for your creativity to shine. Please interpret this prompt however you'd like. A platformer where daylight is your resource? A puzzle game that resets at midnight? A narrative about reaching a turning point? Any angle is fair game!

Additional Prize Categories

Best Ode to Alan Turing: We're thinking algorithms, code breaking, and artificial intelligence. Honor the father of modern computing in your game's mechanics, narrative, or design.
Best Google AI Usage: Tell us how you leveraged Google AI for this submission. Did you build with Antigravity, experiment in Google AI Studio, or use the Gemini CLI? Or is there a Google AI product embedded in your build such as the Gemini API or any Google Cloud product such as Cloud Run? Tell us all about your experience!

Judging Criteria

All submissions will be judged on the following:

Relevance to Theme: Does the game clearly connect to the June solstice or celebration themes?
Creativity: Is the concept original or is it an interesting take on a familiar idea?
Technical Execution: Is the game functional, well-built, and playable?
Writing Quality: Is the submission post clearly written and engaging?
Use of Prize Category (optional): If pursuing a prize category, does the submission meaningfully engage with it?

Prizes

We’ll select three winners for the overall prompt, and one winner for each additional prize category. Our five total winners will each receive:

$200 USD
DEV++ Membership
Exclusive DEV Badge

All participants with a valid submission will receive a completion badge.

How To Participate

Build a game and publish a post on DEV using the submission template below. Your post should include a demo video of your game and provide an overview of how you built it.

June Solstice Game Jam Submission Template

Please review our judging criteria, rules, guidelines, and FAQ page before submitting so you understand our participation guidelines and official contest rules such as eligibility requirements.

Important Dates

June 3: June Solstice Game Jam begins!
June 21: Submissions due at 11:59 PM PDT
July 9: Winners Announced

Questions about the challenge? Drop them in the comments below.

Good luck and happy building!

DEV Community: Jess Lee

Top 7 Featured DEV Posts of the Week

Working on a silly project - share your favorite AI buzzwords/phrases and general key terms with me please!!

What was your win this week??

Congrats to the Hermes Agent Challenge Winners!

Build With Hermes Agent Winners 🏆

Write About Hermes Agent Winners 🏆

Prizes

What's Next?

Congrats to the Gemma 4 Challenge Winners!

🎉 Congratulations To…

Build With Gemma 4 Winners

Write About Gemma 4 Winners

Prizes

What's Next?

Top 7 Featured DEV Posts of the Week

What was your win this week?

Congrats to the Google I/O 2026 Writing Challenge Winners!

🏆 Congratulations To…

Prizes

What's Next?

Github "Finish-Up-A-Thon" Challenge Winner Announcement Delayed & General Challenge Timeline Updates

Top 7 Featured DEV Posts of the Week

Winner Announcement Delayed for the Google I/O 2026 Writing Challenge

Join the June Solstice Game Jam: $1,000 in prizes!

Our Prompt

Additional Prize Categories

Judging Criteria

Prizes

How To Participate

Important Dates