What happens when a DevOps engineer with fifteen years of experience loses the entire AI backend he'd spent the week building?
Nothing a few energy drinks and a new AI vibe coding partner can’t handle.
That particular flavor of chaos and refusal to quit was everywhere at the Springfield Tech Week Vibeathon. Forty-seven builders spent five days turning ideas into working software. Some of them had been coding for decades. Some had never shipped anything. A few weren't sure they'd make it to Friday. They all did.
Five Days. Two Challenges. No Excuses.
The Springfield Vibeathon ran March 23–27 as Codefi's contribution to Springfield Tech Week — and for the first time, participants could join in person or remotely.
Participants chose one of two tracks. The Startup Challenge was simple in theory: bring an idea — any idea — and ship it by Friday. Nineteen teams did. Some of those ideas had been sitting in a notes app for years. Some appeared Monday morning. But by Friday they were working products.
The Vibe the Gap Challenge asked something harder. Software has always been built by developers guessing what users actually need. Thirteen teams spent the week trying to close that gap — to build the thing existing tools keep missing. It's a deceptively simple prompt that will keep you up at night if you let it.
Thirty-two teams submitted. The work was real.
Five Days. Two Challenges. No Excuses.
Neal Richardson Sr. walked into the kickoff, looked around at forty-plus competitors, and immediately felt overwhelmed by the competition. By night two he'd overspent his Claude tokens, put a reload on his debit card, and triggered a fraud flag — which suspended his Claude account. His entire backend ran on Claude.
In a normal hackathon, that's the end of the story. But vibe coding meant he could stay up, switch to a platform he'd never used, rebuild the whole thing, and still submit before the deadline.
"I had zero expectation of making it to the finals, but I believed in the importance of my product," he said. "Making the finals with such a great group of competitors was a HUGE honor."
He wasn't alone in the eleventh-hour chaos. Charity McGill — a business analyst with twenty-plus years of experience who spent the week building an app her spouse had been requesting for a year — found herself trying to pass a GitHub audio captcha with a friend for thirty minutes at midnight.
The captcha timed out. They started over. She pushed the code.
"Having the skills to help someone in need is a deep privilege," she said. "Being a finalist feels extra."
Matt Le came to Springfield from Phoenix, where he'd taken hackathons for granted and regretted it. He came back to them here, building a dementia care app in memory of his grandmother — a passion project that combined his photography background, his data science training, and a tool he didn't even know existed.
"Without vibe coding, I could never scale a project like this so quickly," he said. "Anyone that has an idea can build it — and I love that for the future."
The Winners
Vibe the Gap Challenge
1st — Brandon King, Rogersville, MO
2nd — Matthew Stublefield, Springfield, MO
3rd — Elliott Erhard Olathe, KS
4th — Wayne Bridges Republic, MO
5th — Carter Steenhard Olathe, KS
Startup Challenge
1st — Caleb Morse, Lawrence KS
2nd — Alex Balinski Syracuse, MO
3rd — Japheth Campbell & Chris Burros, Springfield, MO
4th — Misty Waters, Springfield, MO
5th — Matt Le, Springfield, MO
What's Next
Cape Girardeau AgTech Vibeathon — May 18–22
The next Vibeathon is coming to Cape Girardeau with a focused challenge: agriculture, food systems, and rural supply chains. If you're building in AgTech — or just ready to see what you can ship in a week — this is your event.
Register at vibeathon.us/cape →
Show Me Network Week — May 4–8
Three events worth your calendar before Cape:
Builders Showcase — May 5, 12–1 PM
Intro to Vibe Coding — May 6, 9–11 AM
AI as a Business Multiplier — May 6, 12–1 PM
Register → codefiworks.com/campaigns/show-me-network-week-2026
Where Do You Go From Here?
Validate it. You proved you can build. Now find out if the market agrees. TractionStudio AI walks you through real customer discovery, AI-synthesized insights, and validation that holds up to investor scrutiny. Eligible Missouri founders access the Ideation stage at no cost. Check your eligibility → codefiworks.com/traction-studio-ai
Level up. Hands-on AI courses built for where you are right now — whether you've never written a line of code or you're a developer ready to multiply your output. Cohort and On-Demand formats. Explore AI Skills Training → codefiworks.com/build-ai-skills
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