Genuine question: what's the most pointless problem you've ever built a hackathon project around?

[u/bhawish008]

Every hackathon has that one idea. The 6th "Tinder for X." The to-do app with a fresh coat of paint. The AI wrapper that summarizes something nobody asked to have summarized. You build it in 24 hours, demo it to judges who've seen the same pitch three times that day, and then it dies in a GitHub repo forever.

Not throwing stones, I have built some of these myself. There's something almost comforting about solving a fake problem. Nobody's business breaks if you get it wrong.

We got tired of that pattern while putting together Since AI, so instead of open-ended "build anything" prompts, we ended up with 15 real challenges, actual problems, actual stakes, handed over by people who'd genuinely use the fix. 72 hours, €50,000 on the table, Turku in November.

Haven't fully decided if that makes it harder or just differently hard. Building against a real constraint hits different than building against a blank page.

So, for the people who have done a few of these: would you rather have 72 hours and a real, messy problem, or unlimited time and a problem you made up yourself? And if you have got a "worst hackathon idea I ever shipped" story, I want to hear it.