How We Won a Hackathon Without Writing a Single Line of Code (Part 2): AI Judging, the Pitch, and First Place

A developer known as GOROman and the team Null. won first place at the GrokBot Tokyo Hackathon with a project called "Menu of the Future," built entirely by Grok Bot agents with no human-written code or documentation. The team's submission scored 13 out of 15 in the AI first-round judging (5 for idea, 3 for value, 5 for scale), placing first provisionally, and Grok Bot also filled out the Google Form submission itself, with a human only clicking the final Submit button. During the human-judged pitch, an HDMI and macOS screen-mirroring failure forced the team to drop its planned live multi-agent demo and present slides only.

Images from the original Japanese post https://note.com/goroman/n/n78142a1b006d . Read Part 1 https://dev.to/goroman/how-we-won-a-hackathon-without-writing-a-single-line-of-code-part-1-three-people-grok-bot-six-184j · Original Japanese version of this post https://note.com/goroman/n/n78142a1b006d Judging had two rounds: an initial review by Grok Bot, based on what we submitted, and then a pitch in front of human judges. To get through that first round, I had it create a Markdown README that Grok Bot could easily read. I had a rough idea of what the judging bot would be looking for, so I made sure that stuff was in there. We also tried the novel approach of importing our presentation slides back into the GitHub repo's README. Grok Bot made all of that, too. In the end, no human wrote a single character of code or documentation in the repository. Here's what we paid attention to: From X, in English: Submissions with prompt injection won't be judged GrokBotTokyoHackathon The official deadline was 16:00, but our team's deadline was 15:30, giving us a 30-minute buffer. The submission form was a Google Form, so I had Grok Bot read it ahead of time and set things up so it could fill it out automatically in Chrome inside its VM. Because leaving that to the last second is how you die. When the 15:30 alarm went off, we started getting the submission ready. Grok Bot's VM filled in every field. It wouldn't click Submit, though, so I took over the browser just for that bit. We high-fived as a team, then hit Submit. Done. Grok Bot filled out the entire hackathon submission form, too A human only clicked the final Submit button. GrokBotTokyoHackathon GOROman on X · October 11, 2026 https://x.com/GOROman/status/2109175990996132346 The form closed at 16:00, and Grok Bot's AI judging took about 20 minutes. We'd submitted five minutes before the deadline, so we could just sit back and watch. The result: Menu of the Future scored 13 out of 15 in the AI round: 5 for the idea, 3 for value, and 5 for scale . We were alone in first place on the provisional leaderboard. The results of the first-round judging by Grok Bot. GrokBotTokyoHackathon GrokBotTokyoHackathon We made it through the bot judging in first place Next up: the final judging After a break of about ten minutes, it was time to pitch to the human judges. The nice thing about being first on the provisional leaderboard was that we got to present last. You can see what the other teams are doing, get a feel for the room, and even see which jokes land and which ones bomb. It makes things a whole lot easier. Eleven teams presented, and then it was finally our turn. That's when things went wrong. We'd had the MacBook Neo and iPad USB Type-C perfectly prepped, but when we connected them to the venue's HDMI, nothing showed up. Of course it happens during the actual presentation. On top of that, some mysterious macOS bug meant the screen-mirroring button wouldn't respond at all. We'd rehearsed the demo until it was perfect, so this was a pretty bad spot to be in. We plugged in N's MacBook Pro instead to show the slides, and mirrored the iPad through QuickTime. But the all-important live Grok Bot demo was no longer possible. So our three-minute pitch was slides only. We talked through how we'd gotten Grok Bots communicating with each other, all the way through to a working mock restaurant on an iPad. What we'd actually planned to show live was this: place an order through Grok Bot on Limo's iPad, have it arrive at my Grok Bot, and let the organizer bot pull the orders together. Oh well. Let's call it all's well that ends well. Things I keep in mind when presenting: It was hectic, but I think we got across both what we wanted to do and what we'd actually managed to build. As the awards were announced one by one, Team Null.'s name just wasn't coming up. Somewhere along the way, I became convinced: “Okay, we're getting first.” And we did. First place. I lucked out with a great team where everyone could speak freely. 🏆 We took first place 🏆 Team: @vibe walking @ I l l l I GrokBotTokyoHackathon GrokBotTokyoHackathon We won Huge thanks to the best teammates @GOROman @ I l l l I Here’s what we built and how the work progressed We got so much built GrokBotTokyoHackathon We wrapped up with an afterparty at a nearby izakaya, then headed to Saizeriya for round two. Naturally, we ordered through AI agents. For us, “Menu of the Future” was already “Menu of the Past.” The end. I also run a subscription on X. If you'd like to support me, you can subscribe here https://x.com/GOROman/creator-subscriptions/subscribe .