Saurabh Yergattikar worries about his daughters, ages 8 and 3 months, growing up in the urban wilds of San Francisco. So this month, the eBay engineer devoted his weekend to a hackathon to build “civic tech” to improve the city.
More than 1,000 people signed up for the event, dubbed SF10x, but only 200 engineers, designers, and social workers secured spots. Their prompt was simple: Use AI to fix San Francisco’s toughest problems — homelessness, safety, infrastructure, permitting — by building tools the city can adopt.
Yergattikar worked on a prediction tool to assess dangerous areas of the city. “[My kids] should be comfortable walking at night or taking the BART,” he said. “As a dad, I see things from a different perspective.”
Over 48 hours, inside Frontier Tower, the coworking high-rise on a rundown stretch of Market Street, they formed teams and built 20 projects, which ranged from a legal chatbot that answered questions about regulations to Cityscaper, a platform to help city planners view proposed new builds.
Many teams included people with zero engineering experience, who used AI tools like Lovable (a chatbot-based app builder), ElevenLabs (voice models), and Cline AI (code generation) to prototype their ideas. Judges included Maanasa Sivashankar, a designer from the Mayor’s Office of Innovation, and Steven Bacio of GrowSF. Initially, the only prize offered was personal satisfaction, but sponsors chipped in with Outside Lands tickets and $5,000 in cash.
Civic hackathons are Bay Area fixtures; SF Civic Tech, OpenOakland, and Open Source San Jose have held hackathons for at least a decade, while one-off events from Acceler8 SF have flashed then fizzled. Some have created lasting change; notably, the Adopt a Drain project run by the SF Public Utilities Commission and ShelterTech, launched at a Code for San Francisco hackathon, which is now supported by the Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development.
But momentum stalled after the pandemic, according to Francis Li, president of the volunteer coding group SF Civic Tech, which formed in 2023. Funding for its predecessor, Code for San Francisco (founded in 2013) was axed by Code for America. With AI tools, excitement is picking back up; Li’s group now meets weekly on Zoom, cranking out tools for school volunteering and digital neighborhood bulletin boards.
“With the AI boom, there’s wide-eyed hope that technology is going to accelerate and improve things,” said Li, though he cautioned that in the rush to create AI tools, coders need to factor in costs, security, and privacy concerns. “Not everything can be vibe-coded. And are we paying Open AI forever? Who foots the bill when the cheap phase ends?”
Many first-time civic hackers at SF10x credited Mayor Daniel Lurie as the catalyst for their involvement. He has shaken things up, they said, enough that they believe, for the first time in a while, that maybe the city is fixable.
“It feels like things are unstuck. Lurie is doing a lot more than the previous mayor,” said Dan “DC” Posch, 35, a cryptocurrency payments founder and SF10x organizer.
Posch and his friends, a group of civic-minded techies known for their Bernal Heights rope swing stats tracker and Dolores Park trash pickups, hope to spread the gospel of civic hacking. “We can all be 10x civilians,” said fellow organizer Massey Branscomb. “People who don’t normally see themselves as activists are showing up, because with AI, they can visualize how to make an impact.”
That was true for Theresa Anoje, founder of the social-impact job platform Remotely Good, who spent the weekend working on Dignifi, an AI chatbot to help with reentry to society after prison. “I wouldn't have been able to participate without [AI],” said Anoje, who has no engineering background.
City Hall officials showed up to help: District 5 Supervisor Bilal Mahmood and Director of Citywide Planning Rachael A. Tanner both spoke at the opening, and Sivashankar encouraged participants to contact her via the SF10x chat on Discord.
But San Francisco has seen this play out before. Civic tech has a long graveyard of projects that dazzled on demo day but ended up abandoned when the grants ran out or the volunteers moved away. Supporters insist this time is different, thanks to AI and support from the Mayor’s Office of Innovation.
“People used to treat SF like a pit stop,” said Posch. “Now more people are saying, ‘No, we’re here forever. There isn’t a Plan B.’”
For SF10x organizer Pablo Peniche — an engineer known for commissioning a marble bust of the late Aaron Swartz, the programmer, activist, and open-access hero — that shift matters. “Startup people used to see local civic work as small-time,” he said. “Now they realize that if you can move the needle in San Francisco, the world pays attention.” The SF311 app, for example, runs on Open311, a framework spun out of a hackathon that has been repurposed and used in Boston, New York, Chicago, Seattle, and other cities.
Peniche looped in the Mayor’s Office of Innovation and the Board of Supervisors from the start. “We thought they’d push back, thinking we were saying the problems were their fault,” he said. “Instead, they offered to send people to help. They said, ‘Let’s do this together.’”
For Michael Adams, founder of government transparency startup CivLab and an SF10x judge, the large turnout of first-timers was telling. “People are dissatisfied with the city, and now they can use AI to do something,” he said. “They feel like improvement is possible.”
The winning project was a little on the nose: SF OS, a self-described “one-stop shop” to bridge the gap between civic hackers and government organizations and maximize the chance of impact and adoption. It was built using Lovable AI.
“I’m not naive,” Peniche said. “I don’t think we’ll solve everything with a hackathon. But with AI, we have tools that make it possible for non-coders to build and help the city.”