Ever since I got into university, the one thing I was genuinely excited about was hackathons. I took part in several hackathons like SIH, a few organized by clubs on campus, and some others.
But here's the thing - my team and I never made it past the first round. Not once. Some of my teammates were really good programmers at my university, they had good experience across languages and frameworks. Though we still couldn't clear round one.
People sometimes ask me, "you're such a good programmer, you must've won a ton of hackathons." And when I tell them we never made it past the first round, they look confused. Same question every time - why?
After going through enough of these, I think I finally figured it out. In the LLM era, hackathons aren't really about how well you can program. They're about how well you can prompt an LLM and how many subscriptions you've got.
Every single project I saw was an AI slop. Every design was AI generated; tons of useless animations, readme filled with emojis. And I'm not even against it — the problem is the vibe coders.
I was a judge at a Google Developer Groups on campus hackathon in January 2026, and every project there was 90% written by AI. One team had a chat feature in their web app. I asked the presenter a pretty basic question: "what are WebSockets?" he had no idea. I asked another person how chat works under the hood, what protocol does WebSocket use etc ; surprisingly nobody could answer.
And yet, the projects looked extremely polished. Clean user interfaces, clean powerpoint presentations. And one of those vibe coded apps ended up winning, apparently written almost entirely with AI.
Meanwhile, my teammates and I were writing everything ourselves — code from scratch, built off documentation and templates, no LLM doing the heavy lifting. We took more time, sure. But "we" built it. We even made the presentations ourselves too. Still got rejected every time.
That's really why I stopped participating in hackathons. It's not just that we kept losing :P, mainly because that the thing being rewarded isn't programming anymore. It's presentation skills and AI output quality. Only a handful of people at these events actually care about the craft, and most of the rest are just prompting their way through.
It makes me think about what hackathons were like before all this, when LLMs weren't a thing and everyone actually had to sit down, read docs, figure things out; break and build stuff.
And what genuinely frustrates me is when I show someone something I built and the first question is "how much of this was AI?" when I say I wrote it myself, they're shocked; like that's something weird, I mean isn't that what you're intended to do?
I don't know. Maybe hackathons were always partly about presentation. But it feels like now that's all they are. At least at the ones I went to.
