I used to love attending hackathons and also participating as mentor/judge at times. With the explosion of vibe coded submissions, 1- the number of submissions has exploded, 2- it's much harder to judge quality of project as it's mostly become judging the quality of tool they used.

I'm not really throwing shade at using ai. There are parts where the vibe coding really shines, such as front-end dev which tends to do a great job at, but anything more complex I'm still not convinced.

Exactly this. At a recent hackathon, I spent the bulk of my time actually engineering, building custom model architecture in Lua, wrangling a dataset, and waiting on training loops. The winning project? A slick UI wrapped around a basic LLM API call.

It’s incredibly frustrating. The incentive structure at these events has completely shifted away from actual technical complexity toward whoever can build the prettiest ChatGPT wrapper in 6 hours..

They are now vibeathons. Same thing but now it's how much do you write by hand, it's how much can you delegate to the LLM while you're writing by hand.

That act of juggling has become an important part.

People will just look for harder problems to solve. It will remain but differently

The hackathon judging problem predates AI - it's always been biased toward demos that look impressive in a 3-minute pitch. What AI changed is the floor. Previously you needed at least one competent frontend person to make something presentable. Now anyone can generate a polished UI in an hour. Counterintuitively this should force hackathon organizers to judge on harder criteria: does it actually work with real data? Did you solve a genuinely hard integration problem? Is there a novel architecture decision? The best hackathon I attended had judges who asked to see the git log and architecture diagram, not just the demo.

Still worth it if you optimize for learning and people, not podiums. I only do events with explicit judging weights, then include a short architecture note so judges can see beyond the demo polish. The best outcome is usually meeting one solid future teammate, not winning.

Last hackathon I participated in was merely "best presentation". Code, app did not matter, it was idea and presentation what mattered.

Thankfully, properly working app won that one, nonetheless they suck now.

Before AI people already used preexisting projects for hackathons.

Betteridge's Law. Unless it's more of an essay competition for text to feed the AI beast.