dev.to staff for The DEV Team

Posted on May 7 • Edited on Jun 10

Join the Bright Data Real-Time AI Agents Challenge: $3,000 in prizes!

#brightdatachallenge #devchallenge #ai #webdev

We're excited to announce our newest challenge with Bright Data!

Running through ~~May 18~~ May 25, the Bright Data Real-Time AI Agents Challenge invites you to build intelligent AI agents and systems that can autonomously interact with the web, retrieve live data, and make decisions based on the most current information available.

Whether you're an AI engineer, data scientist, or vibe coder, this hackathon is the perfect opportunity to build something awesome.

One talented developer will take home $3,000, an exclusive DEV badge, and a DEV++ membership! All participants will receive a completion badge.

We hope you give it a try!

Our Prompt

Your mandate is to leverage Bright Data and build an AI agent or system powered by real-time web data.

The most powerful submissions will utilize Bright Data's MCP server to enable all four key actions:

Discover: Find relevant content across the open web
Access: Navigate even the most complex or protected websites
Extract: Pull structured, real-time data at scale
Interact: Engage with dynamic, JavaScript-rendered pages as a human would

The MCP server is specifically designed to empower AI agents to perform these actions seamlessly, and we encourage you to incorporate all four capabilities in your project.

The most important aspect? Your solution should showcase how access to reliable web data improves AI performance in solving real-world problems.

How To Participate

In order to participate, you will need to create a Bright Data account through this link and publish a post using the submission template below.

Your project should integrate Bright Data’s infrastructure for real-time data usage and demonstrate how AI systems perform better when they have reliable, current information from across the web.

All projects must be deployed and functional. If your app requires logging in, please provide testing credentials in your submission and/or instructions on how to best test your application for judges.

Bright Data Hackathon Submission Template

Bright Data Credits

Participants will receive $250 in credits upon signing up through our dedicated sign up link. If you're not seeing the credits in your account, try adding devto as a promo code. If additional credits are required, participants can email [email protected] with the subject line “DEV Challenge - Credit Required,” including the email they used to sign up and details about their use case.

Important Note: Use of Data Provided by Bright Data

If you receive data from Bright Data as part of this challenge, it is solely for use in your project submission. This data is not intended for reuse, resale, or redistribution at any point. Data provided for the competition will be accessed through an account created by Bright Data and credited using a dev.to promotion code. The promotion code will provide the necessary credits to complete your project as part of the challenge. Misuse of the data or credits may result in disqualification from the competition and/or revocation of access.

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

Recommended Tech Stack 🛠️

Use the latest open-source AI tools to build your project. Here’s a modern stack to get you started (but feel free to get creative!):

Frontend: Next.js, Vercel, Streamlit
Embeddings & RAG Libraries: Nomic, Cognita, LLMWare, JinaAI
Backend & Model Access: LangChain, Netflix Metaflow, Hugging Face, FastAPI, Ollama
Data & Retrieval: Postgres, Milvus, Weaviate, PGVector, FAISS
Large Language Models: LLaMA 3.3, Mistral, Gemma 2, Qwen, Phi

You can get to know the Bright Data platform by utilizing their docs and tutorials:

Project Ideas 💡

Real-time news or sentiment trackers
Market or price monitoring bots
LLMs with live data pieplines
Multi-agent research assistants
Crawlers for data extraction from forums like reddit
Or anything else you can imagine!

Important Dates

May 7: Bright Data AI Web Access Hackathon begins!
~~May 18~~ May 25: Submissions due at 11:59 PM PDT
~~May 29~~ June 5: Winners Announced

We can't wait to meet the agents you build! Questions about the challenge? Ask them below.

Good luck and happy coding!

Top comments (46)

Ben Halpern • May 7

Good luck! I've been playing around with Bright Data and am impressed (Inspired by the last Bright Data challenge)

Anshu Mandal • May 7 • Edited

Wishing if prize pool was split into three like all challenges but thanks again for this opportunity I'll try my best 🐱

Also I wanted to ask when will you announce winners of Alibaba challenge?

Collins Dada • May 11

i wished the same. and are we getting participation badges?

Jess Lee • May 12

@contractorx yup! all participants with valid submissions will receive a completion badge.

Jess Lee • May 8

Good luck!

Here are the Alibaba Winners:

Congrats to the Alibaba Cloud Web Game Challenge Winners!

dev.to staff for The DEV Team ・ May 8

#devchallenge #alibabachallenge #webdev #cloud

sahra 💫 • May 9

@jess @brightdata I currently have a bright data account (created from the last Bright data challenge), and I no longer have any free credits. Is there a way I can get the $250 credits without having to create a new account?

Wassim Soltani • May 10

Try reaching out to [email protected] with the subject line "DEV Challenge - Credit Required".

Jess Lee • May 12

@sarahokolo does using the code devto at checkout resolve your issue?

davinceleecode • May 8

Another keyboard is about to get broken again...🔥🔥🔥

P.H Isidor • May 14

Thank God! This was extended. I actually am just starting today. I needed that time, but was willing to push through. Good luck to everyone.👍

Wassim Soltani • May 14

Same here, but I'm curious about what prompted the push..

Jess Lee • May 7

Good luck everyone!

Olga Braginskaya • May 9

So I used a link to sign up and didn't get 250$ credits, only 2$. I don't know how to proceed from here.

Jess Lee • May 9

Oh no! We'll reach out to their team and get back to you ASAP.

Olga Braginskaya • May 9

I wrote to [email protected] and got the code which solved the problem. Thanks!

Jess Lee • May 9

Oh good!

Wassim Soltani • May 10

Same issue happened to me, about to reach out via email.

Wassim Soltani • May 10

If anyone has a similar issue, you can apply the promo code "devto" manually in the billing screen to get the full credits.

Raziel Rodrigues • May 16

I am almost finishing my project be aware with my submission my friends

AQUI É BRASIL!

Shweta Kale • May 26 • Edited

I've seen a few projects using https://api.brightdata.com instead of @brightdata/mcp. I think @brightdata/mcp uses the API under the hood, but they are different, right?

For this hackathon, were we required to use @brightdata/mcp? Can someone confirm if I'm correct or wrong?

@noah_kalson_8115056be2f03