A Hackathon Organizer's Blunt Take on AI's Takeover of Hacking Events
A blog post tied to HackEurope 2026 is making the rounds on Hacker News, with the author venting frustration over how AI coding assistants have changed the hackathon experience. The core complaint: when large language models can scaffold a working app in minutes, the scrappy, sleep-deprived creativity that used to define hackathons risks becoming a contest of who has the best AI prompts rather than who can actually build something clever under pressure.
The post reportedly touches on judging difficulties too - it's increasingly hard to tell how much of a submitted project was genuinely hand-built versus generated, and organizers are struggling to define fair rules around AI tool use.
Commenters on HN are split, with some arguing AI is just the latest tool (like IDEs or frameworks before it) and others agreeing that something about the hackathon ethos is getting lost.