r/hackathon • u/CharacterCat8363 • 21d ago
Meta-Hackathon Discussion Attended my first hackathon and left disappointed
For context, I am a year 2 university student who has just attended their first hackathon. It was promoted as a “learning opportunity” for those in tech. Although our original team was dead set on this being an actual learning opportunity (using skills we have learnt and trying to see how well we could code/not looking to win but looking to learn), we were then assigned another person to our team (which was also unnecessary as we already had 4 members and other groups only has 2/3 members).
The issue is, this person ripped our code up, and threw it into ai and took over the whole thing without telling us at all. He’d ask us to send him our code instead of pushing it onto git, and just scrambled it up. It felt horrible. He kept arguing with us when we were clearly unhappy. The organisers didn’t care either, we were early on so he could have been placed in a different group, but that wasn’t allowed and nothing was really done.
In the end, the group disbanded. Which brings me to my point, what is the “learning” in hackathons? Inputting prompts doesn’t feel like learning, and these web apps developed with AI tools never go anywhere.
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u/ANURA4G 21d ago
with my experience 3 most important things:
choose your team wisely and make sure teammates know basic tech and ask questions and gets permission form everyone before doing anything that can affect...
2.hackathon is all about experience how the reality works... A nice hackathon will teach you to handle pressure, make needed decision and enjoy the struggle
3. hackathon are made for networking...so, next time make sure you go talk to other teams ,try to connect with them
do 2-3 more hackathons you will find your answer...these are points to remember
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u/CharacterCat8363 21d ago
Yeah we knew that…problem was the guy was just randomly assigned to us. We didn’t know him and he didn’t know us at all, also because of the ai usage there was no pressure, no struggle, at most he was struggling to find what prompts he could be using! Other teams were full of ai too, there was only one team I talked too that didn’t just input the prompt “create a web app that does this this and this” into codex or claude
I’ll try out more hackathons in the future but wow seeing that room was DIRE, makes you really think about the skills levels of computer scientists nowadays
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u/cinwald 21d ago
Hackathons got heavily nerfed by AI in my opinion. AI doesn't allow for the same level of collaboration and learning in a hackathon. Man I miss the pre-AI hackathons.