Ask HN: Are hackathons still worth doing? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Are hackathons still worth doing?

13 pointskwar139 comments

I used to love attending hackathons and also participating as mentor/judge at times. With the explosion of vibe coded submissions, 1- the number of submissions has exploded, 2- it's much harder to judge quality of project as it's mostly become judging the quality of tool they used.

I'm not really throwing shade at using ai. There are parts where the vibe coding really shines, such as front-end dev which tends to do a great job at, but anything more complex I'm still not convinced.

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They are now vibeathons. Same thing but now it's how much do you write by hand, it's how much can you delegate to the LLM while you're writing by hand.

That act of juggling has become an important part.

People will just look for harder problems to solve. It will remain but differently

Exactly this. At a recent hackathon, I spent the bulk of my time actually engineering, building custom model architecture in Lua, wrangling a dataset, and waiting on training loops. The winning project? A slick UI wrapped around a basic LLM API call.

It’s incredibly frustrating. The incentive structure at these events has completely shifted away from actual technical complexity toward whoever can build the prettiest ChatGPT wrapper in 6 hours..

I never found that engineering helped much at the hackathons I went to. It was always a slick UI that didn't really do anything, and a good presentation.

As far as my experience goes, hackathons have never been about technical meritocracy but pitching and presentation

Still worth it if you optimize for learning and people, not podiums. I only do events with explicit judging weights, then include a short architecture note so judges can see beyond the demo polish. The best outcome is usually meeting one solid future teammate, not winning.

Last hackathon I participated in was merely "best presentation". Code, app did not matter, it was idea and presentation what mattered.

Thankfully, properly working app won that one, nonetheless they suck now.

In my experience they've always been this way. Real engineers lose to idiots that can knock out a nice Wordpress website. Now the way real engineers lose to idiots that can vibe out a nice UI.

Same same, but different.

Before AI people already used preexisting projects for hackathons.

Betteridge's Law. Unless it's more of an essay competition for text to feed the AI beast.

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