Overview
CreateAThon, listed on Devpost under the tagline "Give Your AI Agent Real Context," is a month-long online open source contribution challenge. The program, called Mergetober, is hosted by WeMakeDevs in collaboration with Cognee and presented with Hacker's Unity. Instead of building a hackathon project that may be archived after the event, participants write production-ready integrations for Cognee, an open-source memory layer for AI agents. Accepted contributions are merged into the live codebase used by developers around the world. Participants are paid to contribute to software that ships to developers and enterprises.
About Cognee
AI models normally start every call with no context. Cognee addresses this by ingesting documents, chats, code, and other data, then turning them into an interconnected knowledge graph. This allows AI agents to remember and reason across sessions.
Format and schedule
- Duration: October 1 to October 31. The Devpost deadline is October 31, 2026 at 5:00 pm EDT.
- Format: Fully online and solo, with individual contributions only.
- Cost: Free to participate.
- Eligibility: Open to people above the legal age of majority in their country of residence, in all countries and territories except standard exceptions listed in the rules.
- Registration: Participants must complete mandatory registration through the WeMakeDevs Mergetober page.
The challenge
Participants can contribute in one of two ways:
- Path A (Pick an Existing Issue): Choose an open issue labeled INTEGRATIONS and hackathon on the Cognee GitHub repository. Examples include GitLab, Linear, Elasticsearch, Postman, AWS S3, and ClickUp.
- Path B (Propose a New Integration): Propose a new integration that Cognee does not yet support by opening a GitHub issue. Participants may open up to 5 such issues.
For every pull request, contributors must also publish a short blog post on a platform such as Substack, Dev.to, or Medium. The post should explain how the integration works in the real world.
How to participate
- Pick an issue: Browse open integration issues on the Cognee repository, comment with your planned approach, and wait to be assigned by @NMZivkovic before starting.
- Build and open a PR: Follow the Cognee integration guidelines and open your pull request during October.
- Write a blog post: Share a guide or a real-world use case for your integration.
- Submit: Complete the submission form on WeMakeDevs with your PR and blog post links. Up to 5 active PRs are allowed at one time.
Prizes
The total prize pool is listed as $5,000 or more.
- Top Contributor Prize ($2,000): Awarded to the person with the most merged contributions. The winner may choose an iPhone Duo, a MacBook Pro, or $2,000 in cash.
- Merged PR Lucky Draw ($100 x 20): Twenty participants are chosen at random from everyone who successfully gets a PR merged. Each receives $100 in cash.
Judging criteria
Submissions are evaluated on Innovation, Technical Implementation, and Presentation. The Devpost page lists Pranjal Jain as a judge.
Community and support
Participants are encouraged to join the official Cognee Discord for technical guidance and mentor support. Questions about the event can be sent to the hackathon manager by email. The Devpost page shows 33 participants and one non-cash prize.
