> A solid 90% of the projects there were just vibe coded slop. Even the ideas were AI.
I attended hackathons in the SF Bay Area where award winning participants had simply made powerpoints
So this doesnt surprise me
And I realized at that point there was an industry of aspirational coders selling a dream of talking to a VC at the hackathons, and I didnt need to be a part of that
> winning participants had simply made powerpoints
Wow.
A student of mine told me of more or less the opposite (but also negative) experience: they attended a hackathon where the winning team spent the whole weekend playing cards - and then presented an app they had already built before the hackathon as their contribution. It was obviously much more polished than the weekend projects.
yeah, when I was attending them the trend became to have X% of code done at the hackathon, but given how many external packages are necessary-ish or commonplace to use, it was impossible to enforce
I began using hackathons as a shared focus space to work on side projects, more like a library
But eventually I got totally disillusioned by them in favor of a more higher signal
I attended hackathons in the SF Bay Area where award winning participants had simply made powerpoints
So this doesnt surprise me
And I realized at that point there was an industry of aspirational coders selling a dream of talking to a VC at the hackathons, and I didnt need to be a part of that