Between August 5 and 8, Camunda hosted its annual Hackdays. The Camunda Hackdays are a yearly tradition that Camunda uses to embrace bottom-up innovation, experimentation, learning, and cross-team and cross-department team building.
The Hackdays are also a powerful reflection of Camunda’s values: allowing individuals to spot real customer problems, explore bold ideas through experimentation, embrace failure as part of learning, and ultimately drive an idea end-to-end to create meaningful impact. With this in mind and without any other constraints, the Hackday results range from early, hacky PoCs to first MVPs that later became production-grade features. Many features you find in Camunda 8 today had their origin in the Hackdays (prominent example: Camunda Play) .
In addition, for this year’s Hackdays, teams were encouraged to try out and use AI coding assistants for a chance to win an additional “AI Pioneers” award, based on public internal voting.
With teams formed across departments (think designers plus engineers, customer success plus platform expert), participants buckled down for three focused days of hacking. Each team’s goal was to produce something useful or thought-provoking to present by the demo on Friday, Aug. 8.
The projects
By Friday, the projects touched every corner of Camunda’s ecosystem. Some solved long-standing developer pain points, others reimagined process automation with AI orchestration, and many blurred the line between playful prototypes and production-ready features.
Given that the Demo Day covered 26 presentations, each about three and a half minutes long, we cherry-picked a handful of projects to highlight:
- Don’t Call Us! We Call You!: This project from Simon B. provides a reliable Zeebe HTTP exporter, making custom HTTP-based integrations (e.g., receiving a notification when a user task is ready to be picked up in a custom tasklist) easier to build.
- Tags Tags Tags: Stephan E. and Konstantinos M. built a PoC showing how a feature allowing users to attach tags (such as businessKey, country, product/beta, etc.) to process instances and other entities within Camunda can add flexibility for users to filter, group, and manage workflows based on these custom tags, unlocking a variety of use cases without needing dedicated model fields each time.
- MERGEncy Room: The MERGEncy room project from Philipp F. and Balazs H. tackled the challenge of BPMN merge conflicts with providing an UI-based BPMN diff and merge tool.
- Up2Date Changelogs: This project improved internal efficiencies (keeping documentation links to changelogs currents). Max T. built and merged this project to production in just one evening, showcasing the power of AI for simple automation scripts.
- VIN It to Win It: Ariv A. and Joey T. built an AI-driven auto-insurance orchestration demo that personalized quotes, routed reviews, and responded dynamically to customers utilizing the latest Camunda Agentic Orcherstration capabilities
- Connector Server Protocol: In this project, Mathias V. and Pavel K. built a reactive Connector Runtime (powered by JSON-RPC) and supporting mini-libraries for TypeScript, Python, and Rust to show how Connectors could be built even more lightweight, in any language.
- AI-powered BPMN Unit Test Generator: Mehdi A.’s IntelliJ plugin automatically writes tests for BPMN workflows, to boost developer productivity and ensure high test coverage for Process Automation projects.
- Stateful Zeebe on Stateless ECS Fargate: Deepthi A., Panagiotis G., Lars L., and Rodrigo L. developed and implemented a first MVP showing how ECS Fargate Camunda 8 deployments can be supported by utilizing an S3 based node-id-mapper.
- C8 AI Agent Chatbot for Camunda forums: Philipp O. showcased how the new Camunda 8 Agentic Orchestration features can be used to develop a process that will ensure timely (answer questions with clear answers right-away), and high-quality (involve internal experts, if needed) responses to questions in the Camunda forums.
Remember, this is hardly an exhaustive list of projects from Hackdays 2025! In addition to this sample, dozens of other projects demonstrated improvements in training, knowledge evaluation, and UI refinements.
The AI Pioneers Award
With teams leaning on GitHub Copilot, and internal AI platforms not just for inspiration but for real code generation, this year’s Hackdays pushed the envelope of what Camundi can do with thoughtful, creative use of AI. Many projects reported that 40–100 percent of their codebase was built from AI suggestions. Outsourcing the building blocks of these projects to AI meant that three days was actually enough time to deliver surprisingly polished demos.
The internal public vote for the AI Pioneers award was tight. The winner was: Adam U., who did not only manage to build one, or two, but six projects within only three days. Doing so, Adam took AI-powered prototyping to the new level, showing internally one of the impacts AI can have. Adam (and his AI CoPilot) delivered the following projects (also see https://camunda.meme/hack/):
- HELM Configurator: configure Camunda 8 HELM charts powered by a Web UI.
- CLI: Doo: CLI tool to wrap commands with persistent variables and contexts.
- BPMN Checker: visual BPMN tool to view and simulate BPMN processes.
- MCP Server: Camunda 8 MCP server demo
- Docs Terminal: Terminal to interact with a C8 installation, directly via the Camunda 8 docs
- Advanced Filter Search: UI component supporting advanced filter queries to be used in the Operate UI
After Adam showcased how to make use of AI-powered software engineering during these Hackdays, he continues to internally educate and champion the usage of AI for software engineering.
Looking ahead
As always, Hackdays is meant to be an opportunity to free the mind from as many constraints as possible and test what seems impossible or unrealistic. What ideas could grow into the features and innovations Camunda customers might use tomorrow? As always, we welcome your thoughts and ideas on our forum. And if you want to join us and contribute to the continued evolution of Camunda, we are hiring!
Stay tuned for Hackdays 2026 and the creativity it will inspire!
Start the discussion at forum.camunda.io