Ask HN: Are hackathons still worth doing?
kwar13 Thursday, February 19, 2026I 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.
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