HackEurope 2026: AI Slop, Front-End Demos, and the Death of Real Hackathons
HackEurope 2026: A short rant on AI and hackathons
The author recounts their experience at HackEurope 2026, a hackathon that was a 'complete shitshow' due to poor organization. They argue that front-end demos and AI-generated projects dominate, with little regard for functionality or long-term viability. They criticize the conformity AI encourages, noting that 90% of projects were 'vibe coded slop' and that cool, out-of-distribution ideas are rare. They also share practical tips on choosing tracks and explaining problems, and observe that the grand winner, an LLM-based wildfire prediction and drone cloud-seeding idea, had little substance behind its polished UI.
The AI says they're 'too hard' and people simply avoid these.
- ludston
It's telling how out of touch the evaluators of these things are that the grand winner designed a tool that's been in use by fire services for decades. (Software that predicts fires based on lightening strikes). But you slap LLM on it, and assert that somehow you can replace the arborists and helicopter pilots with drones (as if the human piloting the thing is the expensive part of a multi million dollar vehicle hauling tonnes of water around anyway) and that tricks non-professionals into thinking you're disrupting a field.
- zachlatta
One easy answer to the slopification of hackathons is to turn to the same method that game jams use - peer voting.
We made this switch in 2022 for nearly all Hack Club hackathons and it’s hugely helped project quality.
- sailorganymede
I did a hackathon this year. I used to do them 10 years ago when I was a student and the biggest difference is the intention of the hackathon. 10 years ago, it was all about having fun and learning some new and cool (it was where I learned NodeJS) but today, the sentiment is all about "what can GTM tomorrow?" or "what would VCs want to fund?"
I can't say I found the Hackathon I did particularly fun. Nothing thrilling about making Claude do things while drinking the free coke.
- acheong08
Oh hey, it's my blog. Weird seeing it posted here.
It's been a while and I now have a lot more context than back when I wrote the post in anger.
Disclaimer: As a result of people I met during the hackathon, I was somehow able to get into Entrepreneurs First, a startup accelerator/residency program and moved from Cardiff to San Francisco. The organizers of the hackathon has lots of ties to people who now fund me. What I say now will obviously be more measured and possibly biased.
There's many types of hackathons, and they exist for different purposes. I went in with the expectation of something similar to Huawei's Tech Arenas where the goal is to find the most technically capable engineers for specific problems (combinatorial optimization, optical network routing, etc) with the ability to communicate tacked on. That is why they're nearly a month long with actual metrics you compete by (latency, profit, etc)
HackEurope is a recruiting pipeline for larger startups and venture capitalists. They are specifically selecting for good pitchers, not technical people (which for them is a dime a dozen)
Having now been in the startup ecosystem for a bit, I can see it playing out very similar to how the hackathon went. Oversell and call it a long term vision when probed & you'll get enough funding to make at least something, even if you have to hire or contract everything out.
I still can't believe I'm here and I feel less and less human each passing day. The temptation of capital chips aw […]
- -mlv
> Front-end is almost everything. There is 0 burden of proof that your project is actually functional or that it has any practical application. As long as it looks cool, investors and non-technical people will eat that up.
This is depressing, I'd expect people at these events to be more informed and less ignorant than the general public.