Tencent Cloud Hackathon in Shenzhen Draws 10,122 Participants From 508 Universities

In September 2026, the Tencent Cloud Hackathon final was held at Tencent's headquarters in Shenzhen, where 42 teams advancing from five global regions competed across three tracks: gaming, agents, and animation. The event ran for 150 days and drew 10,122 participants, who submitted more than 1,000 works. Participants came from 508 universities as well as industries including catering, law, design, and foreign trade. Most shortlisted works were not one-off demonstration programs but replicable AI workflows.

The agent tool platforms used in the event included WorkBuddy, CodeBuddy, and Miora. WorkBuddy supports rapid construction of custom AI workflows through conversation; CodeBuddy covers programming support across the full process from design and development to deployment; and Miora, as a full-scenario creative agent studio, provides creative content generation for graphics, video, 3D, and UI. With these tools, many participants without a programming background, or with no programming knowledge at all, were able to turn ideas into workflows that could be described, executed, experienced, and reused.

"Xiaofuli," which won first place in the East China region, targets lawyers and knowledge workers and positions itself as a work memory layer for the AI era. Through a resident desktop entry point, the product captures, with low interference, the entire process of humans and agents completing tasks together, and automatically assembles completed tasks into reusable PlayBooks, turning one-off work into methodological assets that teams can accumulate. The product can also extract a user's work style and collaboration habits from past tasks to generate shareable, importable persona documents, enabling the transfer of mature experience and delivery standards. The team members are lawyers by profession; the product was built on WorkBuddy and took four months from idea to beta version, completed by the team in their spare time.

The cultural experience interactive game "Record of Tang Dynasty Splendor" had a team of only one person, who began encountering Vibe Coding through WorkBuddy in 2026. During the competition, this member single-handedly completed the planning document and the requirements lists for art and music, and used the product's integrated Skills, MCP, and expert ecosystem to produce 1,000 pieces of artwork and all game music within one week, simultaneously releasing an album on QQ Music and completing full development. Under previous processes, comparable development would have required at least two months of team project initiation.

"Starlight Comic Realm," which won first prize in the agent track, entered the AI comic drama field and presented the AI video generation platform "Starlight Comic Realm Smart Creation Platform." The platform supports one-click upload of TXT scripts, with the system automatically breaking down characters and scenes and generating storyboard videos. It targets comic dramas, advertising, and short video creation, was developed with CodeBuddy, and integrates WorkBuddy capabilities. The platform builds a threefold cost-reduction engine around "gacha rate optimization, multi-model token price comparison and scheduling, and project-level credit budgets," achieving a gacha hit rate of 50%–80%, a 30%–40% reduction in per-video cost, and a more than 60% reduction in overall video production cost. In testing, about two people could produce 100 episodes in about five days, at a per-minute cost of RMB 30 to RMB 150.

On the policy front, Shenzhen in January 2026 issued the "Shenzhen Action Plan for Building a Leading Destination for Artificial Intelligence OPC Entrepreneurship Ecosystem (2026–2027)," proposing that by the end of 2027 it would build more than 10 OPC communities each with an area of no less than 10,000 square meters and cultivate more than 1,000 high-growth AI startups. The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and six other departments jointly issued a document explicitly calling for "accelerating the cultivation of artificial intelligence one-person companies," and more than 20 cities nationwide have introduced special support policies.

Tencent began large-scale deployment of AI applications in 2025. Its programmers basically use AI-assisted development, WorkBuddy has covered 90% of Tencent employees, and it is being applied in various vertical fields. The WorkBuddy enterprise edition was officially launched in mid-May 2026, and by September it had signed more than 10,000 enterprise customers, covering more than 50 industries.

Data for the first quarter of 2026 show that the overall AI adoption rate among large and medium-sized enterprises had reached 90.9%, but 67.3% of enterprises remained at the exploratory experimentation level; general assistance scenarios accounted for 83.7% of enterprise AI agent projects, while specialized in-depth scenarios accounted for only 16.3%.

An industry survey in August 2026 showed that 40% of OPC entrepreneurs had already produced products or services but had not yet generated paying customers; 60% listed customer acquisition and sales as their biggest difficulty; and more than half of OPCs had monthly revenue of less than RMB 10,000.

Regarding the conversion of competition works, Tencent Cloud is cooperating with creators at the product level on reusable agents and Skills, and will promote products suitable for students and teachers to more student and teacher groups, using the competition to expand the reach of the results.