Helder Vasconcelos ⛩️

CTO & Co-Founder @LayerXlab . Building @taikainetwork, @luziadev, book author and engineer.

[Helder Vasconcelos ⛩️ @heldervasc]

𝗕𝗼𝘁𝘀 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗵𝘂𝗺𝗮𝗻𝘀, 𝘀𝗮𝗺𝗲 𝗽𝗹𝗮𝘁𝗳𝗼𝗿𝗺, 𝘀𝗮𝗺𝗲 𝘁𝗼𝗼𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗴, 𝘀𝗮𝗺𝗲 𝗿𝘂𝗹𝗲𝘀 🤖👨‍🏭

@taikainetwork is the first hackathon platform where AI agents can participate alongside humans, end to end.

We just shipped a native MCP connector and your AI preferred Agent (Claude, ChatGPT Codex, Gemini, any MCP-compatible model) can now connect directly to TAIKAI and act on your behalf. Not just read. Act

𝗙𝗼𝗿 𝗽𝗮𝗿𝘁𝗶𝗰𝗶𝗽𝗮𝗻𝘁𝘀: run an entire hackathon from inside your AI assistant.

𝗙𝗼𝗿 𝗲𝘃𝗮𝗹𝘂𝘁𝗼𝗿𝘀: Get live submissions, review projects, vote, all without opening the platform.

Humans built hackathons. Now agents can run in them too.

[TAIKAI @taikainetwork]

𝗪𝗲’𝘃𝗲 𝗷𝘂𝘀𝘁 𝘀𝗵𝗶𝗽𝗽𝗲𝗱 𝗮 𝗺𝗮𝗷𝗼𝗿 𝗺𝗶𝗹𝗲𝘀𝘁𝗼𝗻𝗲 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗧𝗔𝗜𝗞𝗔𝗜: 𝗮 𝗻𝗮𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝗠𝗖𝗣 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝗻𝗲𝗰𝘁𝗼𝗿. 🔗

This makes TAIKAI the first agentic hackathon platform, where AI models like @claudeai, @OpenAI's ChatGPT, and @GeminiApp can connect directly to the platform and take action on your behalf.

And this is only step one.

Next up: something even bigger, the first hackathon where AI models compete against each other. Stay tuned.

[LayerX @LayerXlab]

Some say we’re addicted to building with AI.

They’re probably right.

Our CTO @heldervasc built uberSKILLS, a visual workbench for creating, testing, and deploying Agent Skills.

From idea to deployment, in one place.

Here’s the story. ⬇️

[Helder Vasconcelos ⛩️ @heldervasc]

At first I was skeptical about joining this hackathon. My chronic perfectionism has always held me back from short ones, not enough time to 𝗺𝗮𝗸𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗴𝘀 𝗷𝘂𝘀𝘁 𝗿𝗶𝗴𝗵𝘁. But this time @henriq__e and @hypermarioal pushed me to drop that mental model, and we ended up building something I'm genuinely proud of, stretching our LLM and data science skills to the limit.

It feels like magic 🪄 . You upload a PDF of construction schematics and get back an accurate time prediction for how long the module will take to build. You upload a video, and the system annotates it and predicts, with some accuracy, the tasks the workers are performing.

Once the system started taking shape, we knew we had something genuinely useful on our hands.

And this time I showed up as a builder, not an organizer. Glad I did. 🚀

[Mario @hypermarioal]

I usually show up to hackathons to organize, mentor or judge.

At Fixathon, me, @heldervasc and @henriq__e were on the other side and built, just for fun. The room was so strong we never expected to win.

We did. 🏆

The full story 👇

[DHH @dhh]

The EU is 6% of global emissions. Committing economic harakiri in response to climate concerns is pure vanity. Europe can't save the planet because the continent doesn't have any meaningful influence on the outcome.

[Helder Vasconcelos ⛩️ @heldervasc]

@Jmoon_174 @LayerXlab Completely true 👍

[Helder Vasconcelos ⛩️ @heldervasc]

𝗦𝘁𝗼𝗽 𝗽𝗿𝗲𝘁𝗲𝗻𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝘆𝗼𝘂 𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝗮𝗯𝗹𝗲 𝘁𝗼 𝘀𝗵𝗶𝗽 𝗮 𝗦𝗮𝗮𝗦 𝗶𝗻 𝟰 𝗵𝗼𝘂𝗿𝘀.

You shipped a prototype. Then you tweeted a screenshot. Then you ran.

We've been shipping with AI agents every single day for the last year at @LayerXlab . They write roughly 80% of the code we put into production. I'm not the guy telling you AI is overhyped.

But the "one prompt rebuilt years of work" crowd is selling you a magic trick.

𝗧𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗱𝗲𝗺𝗼 𝘆𝗼𝘂 𝘀𝗮𝘄? It's the cheap 80%. Edge cases, security, concurrency, performance budgets, the decisions made after real incidents at 3am , one of that is in your 4-hour build. And no, your test that "checks the happy path" doesn't count.

𝗛𝗲𝗿𝗲'𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗽𝗮𝗿𝘁 𝗻𝗼𝗯𝗼𝗱𝘆 𝘄𝗮𝗻𝘁𝘀 𝘁𝗼 𝗮𝗱𝗺𝗶𝘁:

- Without a design, the agent will invent one for you. That's not a feature.
- A prototype is a promise, not a product.
- Every model release rewrites your assistant's personality. Treat it like a new hire.
- The agent amplifies the engineer you already are. If you're sloppy, you're now sloppy at machine speed.
- Engineering process review, conventions, CI discipline is the moat now. Not your prompt library.

𝗥𝗲𝗽𝗹𝗮𝗰𝗲𝗱 𝗲𝗻𝗴𝗶𝗻𝗲𝗲𝗿𝘀? No. Amplified ones. The gap between the two crowds is about to get embarrassing.

11 lessons from the trenches, one per slide. The honest version. Not the demo.

Full essay https://t.co/Z60VwXGYIa

Disagree? Even better. Tell me where I'm wrong.

[ickas @henriq__e]

With TAIKAI MCP, the sky is the limit 🚀

Your AI can now run the entire hackathon lifecycle for you: discover, register, submit, build teams, vote, all from a single prompt.

Wrote a full tour of what's inside. ~30 tools, four use cases, from beginner to expert:

→ The scout: "find open AI hackathons closing in 30 days, prizes above $10k"
→ The auto-submitter: register, fill the form, draft a project, one prompt
→ The pitch writer: read my repo, write the description, publish it
→ The voting concierge: weighted vote allocation across the leaderboard

And the payoff: a solo agent that runs every morning, finds the best match, registers you, and drafts a build plan while you sleep.

No limits. Build basically anything.

[luzia @luziadev]

https://t.co/XAmTBL1nU3

[TAIKAI @taikainetwork]

𝗗𝗼 𝘆𝗼𝘂 𝘄𝗮𝗻𝘁 𝘁𝗼 𝗴𝗲𝘁 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝘁𝗲𝗮𝗺 𝗶𝗻𝘁𝗼 𝘃𝗶𝗯𝗲𝗰𝗼𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗶𝗻 𝟮𝟰 𝗵𝗼𝘂𝗿𝘀?

Most teams are still adopting AI one person at a time but it isn’t a single-player anymore. The ones pulling ahead do it together.

We built the AI Workshops Playbook to help you run hands-on sessions that get your whole team aligned, fast. Ready-to-use. No fluff.

[LayerX @LayerXlab]

We're building something that has never been done before.

In conversation with Alexandra Luís (@Lusa_noticias) and featured in Executive Digest, @hypermarioal announced that @taikainetwork will host the world’s first hackathon run entirely by AI agents.

ChatGPT (@OpenAI), @claudeai, @GeminiApp, @MistralAI, @deepseek_ai, all competing on a real platform.

Agents build and evaluate. Research paper coming on June 15th.

Stay tuned. 👀

[TAIKAI @taikainetwork]

They said AI would kill hackathons.

Spoiler: the opposite is happening.

In 2026, hackathons are faster, sharper, and more impactful than ever. And that's because of AI, not in spite of it.

48h, more ideas, real prototypes, and actual outcomes.

Rita Simões breaks down why. 👇

[LayerX @LayerXlab]

🙌 @taikainetwork just entered a new era: the first agentic hackathon platform.

Powered by a native MCP connector, AI models can now connect directly to TAIKAI and act inside hackathons, from creating projects to managing submissions.

This creates a new way of building where AI is no longer just on the sideline, but actively working with you.

Find more. 👇

[Helder Vasconcelos ⛩️ @heldervasc]

Heading to Sim Conference this week. 🤝

Representing @LayerXlab , we’ll be around on May 14th & 15th. 

If you're implementing AI systems,Inference Infra, or AI agents in your company, come talk to us.

Don’t miss:
➡️ You’ll also find the LayerX team at the Showcase Room, Booth 44, on May 15th.

See you in Porto! 🙌 🍷

[luzia @luziadev]

☕ Morning coffee ✅
📊 Charts open ✅
📰 Headlines scrolling ✅

This is what a #crypto enthusiast daily ritual looks like in 2026.

We built https://t.co/3nLpxFSB1M for people exactly like this. 👀

[LayerX @LayerXlab]

Introducing Ask SIM, an AI concierge created by LayerX for SIM Conference 2026, a @StartupPortugal innitiative.

Ask anything about the event: speakers, schedule, venue, tickets, or who to meet, and get instant answers with sources.

We’re excited to be at SIM Conference 2026, bringing Ask SIM with us to enhance how attendees experience the event on the ground.

[Captain Insight @CaptainInsightX]

Netflix, Wikipedia, Airbnb, Dropbox ~ all run on the same web server.
One quiet Russian engineer wrote it alone. For free. 🤯

Meet Igor Sysoev 🇷🇺

> Russian software engineer. Born 1970 in Soviet Kazakhstan.
> Failed his first university entrance exam.
> Joined Rambler in 2000 as a system administrator.
> 2002 ~ started writing a new web server in his free time. Alone.
> Goal: handle 10,000 simultaneous users on one machine ~ a problem Apache (the dominant web server at the time) couldn't solve.
> 2004 ~ released nginx publicly. Free. Open source.
> Zero marketing. Zero PR. Just the code.
> 2008 ~ nginx was serving 500 million requests per day at Rambler.
> 2011 ~ founded Nginx Inc. with co-founder Maxim Konovalov.
> 2013 ~ Netflix scaled its streaming CDN to 40 Gbps per server using nginx.
> 2019 ~ F5 acquired the company for $670 million.
> December 2019 ~ Russian police raided his Moscow office over a fake copyright claim.
> The Russian tech community publicly defended him. Charges were dropped.🚀
> 2021 ~ nginx overtook Apache as the #1 web server on Earth.
> 2022 ~ left F5 quietly. No farewell tour. No book deal.
> Today nginx powers Netflix, Wikipedia, Airbnb, Dropbox, Cloudflare, WordPress.
> 33% of every website on Earth runs on his code. Apache trails at 26%. Microsoft's IIS isn't even close.
> Still 100% open-source. Still free.

One man wrote it alone, in his free time, for free.
He never sought publicity. He never asked for credit.
A third of every website on Earth still runs on his work.

Webserver GOAT. 🐐

[TAIKAI @taikainetwork]

Welcome to r/HackathonBuilds, a community for people who build in hackathons! 🧩

Share your projects, find teammates, and discover new hackathons.

Whether you're shipping your first idea or your tenth, this is a space to connect and build faster together.

[Mario @hypermarioal]

https://t.co/OdPPg7eXSM

[Helder Vasconcelos ⛩️ @heldervasc]

Do you want to give your blog a voice ? 🔉

How we turned posts into audio with open models, locally, on a Mac with mlx .

At first it might seem easy.

Grab the first text-to-speech library you find, point it at a markdown file, and let it talk.

We tried that early on, just to feel the shape of the problem.

The result was instructive. By instructive I mean: it sounded awful.

I wrote an article on @LayerXlab detailing the entire process, from the three stages pipeline, to how we run it on a laptop.

https://t.co/2qSjops9nO

[Helder Vasconcelos ⛩️ @heldervasc]

Now you can listen to our articles 💥

Another feature that we built in house using TTS (Text to Speech Models) open source models, MLX frameworks and LLM processing .

We will publish an article about this journey soon

[LayerX @LayerXlab]

Adjust your headphones: the LayerX blog just got a voice. 🗣️

You can now listen to articles with text-to-speech, whenever reading isn’t an option.