The results are in!
We're thrilled to announce our winners for the Notion MCP Challenge! From dynamic creative journals to meal planning assistants and resume tailoring tools, the range of submissions was impressive.
The creativity and technical depth on display made judging genuinely difficult. Every entry showed real thought about how to leverage Notion MCP in meaningful ways. While we wish we could recognize every submission, here are the three that stood out the most.
Congrats to our winners!
🏆 First Place: NoteRunway
@georgekobaidze built an AI-powered workspace management tool that feels like having a flight control tower for Notion. The hybrid architecture was impressive: direct API access for speed on bulk reads, and Notion MCP as a safety layer for all destructive writes. For anyone drowning in hundreds of orphaned pages and forgotten API keys, this one's for you.
🏅 Runner Ups: DevNotion & Relay
@yashksaini solved a problem we all know too well: Monday standup amnesia. DevNotion is a 3-agent pipeline that automatically harvests a week of GitHub activity every Sunday, narrates it into a first-person blog post, and publishes a planner-style page to Notion and a draft article to DEV. Cool, well-written, and the kind of automation you'd actually run every week.
@caposto tackled a high-stakes real-world problem with Relay: an incident management assistant that handles all the documentation in real-time. A tool like this would be genuinely invaluable at enterprise scale. By letting the agent decide how to interact with the workspace rather than hardcoding specific tool calls, Relay takes full advantage of what MCP makes possible.
Prizes
Our winner will receive:
- An invitation to chat with Ivan Zhao, Co-Founder and CEO of Notion
- $500 USD
- DEV++ Subscription
- Exclusive DEV Winner Badge
Both runner-ups will each receive:
- $500 USD
- DEV++ Subscription
- Exclusive DEV Winner Badge
All participants with a valid submission will receive a completion badge on their DEV profile.
Our Sponsor
A huge thank you to Notion for partnering with us on this challenge. Seeing what the community built with Notion MCP is a testament to how powerful AI-native workflows can be when developers get creative with the right tools.
What's Next?
Our second DEV Weekend Challenge is happening now! With Earth Day just around the corner, we welcome you to build something inspired by the planet. Submissions are due April 20, 2026 6:59 AM UTC.
The OpenClaw Challenge is running through April 26 with a $1,200 prize pool across two prompts: build something with OpenClaw, or publish a post that educates and inspires. Six winners total, each taking home $200 and a DEV++ Membership.
Thank you to everyone who participated. We hope you had fun, pushed your skills, and maybe even gave your Notion workspace a much-needed checkup along the way.
See you next time!
Top comments (16)
No way! This win means so much to me for so many reasons. Huge thanks to the DEV and Notion teams, this really motivates me to keep participating in more and more challenges.
When I first started using Notion as my productivity tool, I was really impressed by the idea behind it, and I never would have imagined that I'd one day be a winner of a challenge related to such an amazing company! I'm incredibly happy!
Congrats to the runner ups as well, you did an amazing job! 🏆️
Just reached and opened mail. Can not believe it finally after 2 years on writing blogs and building projects, finally achieved a major win, very glad that the community loved the idea. Very grateful for the @georgekobaidze for the ultimate win, and congratulations to @caposto for getting reward as runner up as well. Thanks a lot, @thepracticaldev @jess
Congrats. Great job! Keep on writing and building!
Congrats!
Congrats!! 🥳
Congrats!!👏
Congrats to all of the winners and to everyone who submitted a project.
Congrats!
The NoteRunway hybrid architecture is honestly the smartest part here - using direct API for bulk reads but routing destructive writes through MCP as a safety layer. That's the kind of design decision that separates a weekend hack from something you'd actually trust in production.
DevNotion solving "Monday standup amnesia" with a 3-agent pipeline is so relatable it hurts. I've been manually writing weekly summaries for months and now I feel silly about it.
Really curious if any of the winners have thoughts on MCP's current limitations around auth and permission scoping - that's been my biggest friction point when building similar integrations.
The hybrid approach in NoteRunway is honestly what sold me on it too. Using direct API for reads but MCP as a safety net for destructive writes is such a smart pattern - I've been burned before by accidentally nuking pages when testing automation scripts against my own workspace. DevNotion solving the "what did I even do last week" problem is hilarious because I literally have a cron job that just dumps git log to a text file for standups. A proper agent pipeline doing that automatically is way more useful than my janky solution.
The hybrid pattern NoteRunway uses — direct API for reads, MCP for destructive writes — is one of the best architectural decisions I've seen in MCP projects. I run a production MCP server over a 130k-node Neo4j graph, and we arrived at the same conclusion independently: MCP adds real value as a safety layer for mutations, not as a universal API wrapper.
The temptation is to route everything through MCP for consistency. But read-heavy workloads pay a real latency penalty for the extra round-trip through tool dispatch. NoteRunway's approach gives you speed where it matters (bulk reads) and governance where it matters (writes that change state).
Relay's agent-driven tool selection is interesting too — the distinction between hardcoded tool calls and letting the agent decide which MCP tools to invoke maps to something we've seen in multi-agent systems: agents that discover tools at runtime make fewer errors than agents with a fixed tool manifest, because the discovery step forces them to match the tool to the actual task rather than pattern-matching on tool names.
Congrats to all the winners.
Some comments may only be visible to logged-in visitors. Sign in to view all comments.