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@michael_chomsky offered to cowork or have agents work on the project, proposing…

2026-08-07 · 07:08 UTC ·@michael_chomsky ·1 min read

Brief

swyx's eval competition idea proposes a weekend remote hackathon to clone an enterprise SaaS his team expects to pay >$40,000/year for; participants get $1,000 in tokens, the winner earns $10,000 and a @latentspacepod writeup, all code is open source, and swyx's team will judge. @michael_chomsky volunteered to cowork or run agents (one-shot via a Claude voice note).

Why it matters

@michael_chomsky offered to cowork or have agents work on the project, proposing a one-shot run after a sufficient voice note to Claude.

Key details

  • swyx proposed a remote hackathon to 'kill' high-margin enterprise SaaS: his team faces paying >$40,000/year for an uncustomizable product; he will fund $1,000 in tokens per team, the winner receives $10,000 cash plus a @latentspacepod writeup, all code will be open-sourced and his team will evaluate clones.
Source evidence

If anyone wants to cowork with me while we work on this (or our agents work on this, should be a one-shot after a good enough voice note to claude) lmk

swyx (@swyx)

eval competition idea: Help kill my SaaS

my team is proposing to pay >$40k/year for enterprise saas we have never used and will never be able to customize.

as a smol business owner, this feels shitty.

thinking of doing a small remote hackathon:
- i cover $1000 in tokens for you
- you do your best to clone this SaaS in a weekend
- my team (your prospective customer) evals it
- winner gets $10,000 cash & @latentspacepod writeup
- all code is open sourced

everyone wins except high margin low moat saas.
we keep doing this with increasingly ambitious saas things for SMBs until we find the boundary of what saas is still hard to kill in a weekend.

does that work?

— https://nitter.net/swyx/status/2085517544795079014#m