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Comment on HackEurope 2026: A short rant on AI and hackathonsparent

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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

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