> A solid 90% of the projects there were just vibe coded slop. Even the ideas were AI.

I attended hackathons in the SF Bay Area where award winning participants had simply made powerpoints

So this doesnt surprise me

And I realized at that point there was an industry of aspirational coders selling a dream of talking to a VC at the hackathons, and I didnt need to be a part of that

> 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.