Everything you need to start the Zerops Challenge: quick links, common fixes, and where to ask for help.
Our dev team is active for the whole Challenge. If anything feels slow or breaks, come find us on Discord.
Now
August 8 to 9
Sunday, August 9
ZCP is an AI coding agent that lives inside your Zerops project, not beside it. It can read your live services, write code, deploy it, and verify it actually runs, retrying with the logs if something fails.
Why use it: it removes the setup and debugging grind so you spend the weekend on the idea, not the infrastructure.
The agent you connect is your own. Zerops does not supply a built-in model, so it uses your agent and your tokens: pick whichever one you already use most.
A recipe is a working app with the infrastructure already set up: a managed database, zerops.yaml, environment variables, all connected and ready to run. It's not just a code template you still have to wire up yourself.
Recipes work together with ZCP, too. Point ZCP at a recipe and it can deploy it and adapt it for you.
Recipes are also the fastest way to get a correct zerops.yaml. ZCP can adapt a recipe to your idea instead of starting from a blank project.
Research assistants, support agents, knowledge search tools.
Uptime monitors, deployment dashboards, status pages.
Collaborative editors, live incident rooms, shared planning tools.
Document conversion, data ingestion, scheduled jobs.
Booking platforms, project management tools.
A zerops.yaml generator, deployment analyser, migration assistant.
Any category works as long as Zerops is meaningfully used. These are inspiration only.
Example prompt: "Build a task board for my team. Tasks should stay saved after a refresh."
Pick the region closest to you. We run in three regions: EU Central (prg1), US West (sea1), and US East (ny1). Choosing one far from you can cause noticeable lag.
Hit lag or something breaks? Hop into our Discord and tag the team, we're on it.
Confused about importing a project? The fastest path is letting ZCP handle the import for you after you authorize your agent, rather than hand writing an import file. If you'd rather do it yourself, examples are in the recipes (for example, the Node.js Hello World recipe's import file).
See the full quickstart guide for more troubleshooting.
Main track. One winner: best overall project, judged on idea, execution, and how Zerops is used. Prize: MacBook Neo.
Social track. One winner: best build post, judged on clarity of story, demo, and reach. Prize: Logitech MX Master 3.
Credits pool. $5,000 in Zerops credits split across standout projects.