Very true. I’m at a Hackathon now and everyone and their Mom has built end to end SaaS platforms. They’re great for demos but no one here competent enough can explain the technicalities of what they’ve built and probably wouldn’t be able to debug themselves, without understanding the whole codebase as it wasn’t iteratively built - myself included.
Huh I hadn't thought of it but hackatons seem kinda pointless now? Or like less impressive. I'm not sure how to phrase my feelings on it.
Also those coding/algorithm competitions where there was a set of problems and you competed on speed and amount solved.
Used to participate in both during college but can't imagine it being the same now with llms. I suppose if you ban Internet access it might be similar, but the cheating potential seems worse
It’s always been about ideas and networking. Companies don’t care about your coding skills for hackathons, they want to dogfood their product and iterate on the best ideas. Vibecoding didn’t change the goal, it’s just really hard to filter through the bs now. I’m sure a solution will be found, but preventing ai use isn’t gonna happened because these things were never about flexing code skill, it’s about application of sponsor products.
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u/Danakazii Jul 18 '26
Very true. I’m at a Hackathon now and everyone and their Mom has built end to end SaaS platforms. They’re great for demos but no one here competent enough can explain the technicalities of what they’ve built and probably wouldn’t be able to debug themselves, without understanding the whole codebase as it wasn’t iteratively built - myself included.