The other points were always true for hackathons (For some more than others, depending on judges/audience), even before AI coding was a thing.
> I've been working on this since last September at a slow burn (no code reused for HackEurope though) and the goal is to have a running startup by May.
If anything, this is pretty much the opposite of what a hackathon is supposed to be: A place where you meet people you might not even know, come up with an idea on the spot and develop an MVP + pitch it on a tight (time) budget. Taking an idea you've already been working on for months and using it for a hackathon submission feels... odd
> A solid 90% of the projects there were just vibe coded slop. Even the ideas were AI. You can tell when multiple people implemented the exact same idea with the exact same title, description, and implementation.
The first is probably true, but to really judge the impact of it (Did AI generated ideas actually win?) we'd have to see the results
> A lot of cool ideas are out of distribution from the training data, and those rarely show up at hackathons anymore. The AI says they're "too hard" and people simply avoid these.
Probably true, but again, not a new phenomenon.