Non-Coders Winning Hackathons: What Domain Experts Bring
A personal injury lawyer took 1st at Anthropic's hackathon without writing code. What that says about non-coders winning hackathons, and where coding helps.
A Lawyer Won Anthropic's Hackathon Without Writing Code
Mike Brown, a personal injury lawyer, took 1st place at Anthropic's Built with Opus 4.6 hackathon, a global virtual event held February 10 to 16, 2026. Co-host Cerebral Valley puts the applicant count at 13,000. According to Anthropic's winners post, 500 were selected and only 1 of the 5 winners was a professional developer. In the same post, Brown says he didn't write a single line of code, or even read one.
His project, CrossBeam, reads California ADU building-permit plan sets and correction letters, cross-references city and state code, and returns an action plan in about 20 minutes instead of weeks. He built it with Claude Code, drawing on years of legal experience.
Two More Non-Coders Who Won
Nina Kolari, a non-technical entrepreneur who learned iOS development with AI tools, built Aphasio, an iPhone communication app for people with aphasia, in 3 hours and beat 27 other teams at the Cursor hackathon in Chiang Mai (her write-up on ninakolari.com, December 2025).
Rene Turcios, a self-described 'vibe coder' who doesn't know how to code, has competed in 200+ hackathons since 2023 and keeps winning prizes (The San Francisco Standard, July 2025).
These three show that AI coding tools like Cursor, Claude Code, and ChatGPT can get someone who knows a problem well to a working prototype. They aren't enough to say non-coders usually beat developers.
What Domain Experts Bring
Judges reward projects that solve a real problem, and a lawyer or a doctor starts out knowing which problems in their field are real. Kolari's write-up says much the same about her win: she built something simple that solved a specific, painful problem, and the judges responded to clarity.
Dr. Michal Nedoszytko, who placed 3rd at the Anthropic event, is a different case. Anthropic describes him as a cardiologist who had spent 20 years building healthcare software alongside his practice, and he built PostVisit.ai in 7 days. He scopes his own claim:
“Currently, you don't have to know programming to create solutions, or at least prototypes of solutions, for something that you can use personally.”
So coding skill still helps. If you don't have it, compete on what you know.
Do This
- Win on the problem and the user experience
- Pick one specific problem and keep the build simple
Avoid This
- ✕Competing on technical complexity
- ✕Copying what developer teams build
- ✕Padding it with extra features
The Tools: Cursor and Claude Code
Cursor is an AI code editor, and Claude Code, which Brown used, is Anthropic's AI coding assistant. In both, you describe what you want in plain English and the AI writes the code. People call this vibe coding.
Describe it
Say what to build. Be specific about the problem and what the user sees.
Try it
Use what it made. You don't have to read the code to check that it works.
Say what to change
'Make the button bigger,' 'add a loading state,' 'fix the mobile layout.'
Deploy
Ship it with one command when it's ready.
Two Things to Do Yourself
Keep API keys (the passwords your app uses to reach services like OpenAI) out of your code and off GitHub: put them in a .env.local file yourself, not in the chat. And before you share the link, open the live site and try it the way a judge would.
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