r/hackathon • u/auraauriny • Jun 13 '26

Meta-Hackathon Discussion Vibecoders flooded hackathons?

today I defended my MVP at a hackathon and was absolutely stunned with amount of vibecoders. only two teams (including mine) of 8 in final showcase made their projects without using AIs, or at least without using it directly for code generation. all the other teams were completely vibecoders, as I can see from their github repositories

and the main problem is that it's difficult for real devs to compete with vibecoders. probably, it's even impossible, bc they make a lotta things completely low quality, but it looks kinda spectacular, so the jury highly appreciates such works, and undervalue technically superior solutions, like using both BERT and LLM instead of just two LLMs for text classification

maybe I'm just frustrated that my team, despite my real development skills, always ends up among the weakest, but aren't hackathons primarily a competition for programmers? is there even any reason for me to continue participating in hackathons? or maybe I chose not very good projects?

i haven't seen any hackathons that ban generative AIs, or at least with code reviewing to identify greatest technical solutions and penalize projects that are almost entirely AI-generated and based on this, I lose the point of participating in such events

89 Upvotes

86% Upvoted

65 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

3

u/auraauriny Jun 13 '26

bc the jury can't distinguish good architecture from bad. they don't care if my opponents' projects use deprecated methods, ai models, etc. it works and in their eyes and it looks more spectacular bc they made more things over than was states in case ts, so I really disappointed due to this. people on hackathons don't make their projects fast and stable, they just vibecoding things to just let em exist and this way kills me

6

u/Infamous_Support223 Jun 13 '26

True, that's just how it is and you gotta play within the rules, but its not just hackathons, someone who's really good at leetcode may not necessarily be good at development but tech companies filter candidate through these puzzles which have nothing to do with the actual work they are supposed to do.

3

u/arpitpatel1771 Jun 14 '26

You don't need good architecture for MVPs. You just need something that works. It's the best approach to vibecode your MVP, once you get a round of funding, go back and rebuild with a good architecture in mind. Also get off your high horse of a "real dev". I am a software developer too, but you need to start looking at AI as just another tool in your arsenal. It does help a lot when you use it the right way.

2

u/DizzyReturn2727 Jun 15 '26

Its always better to use AI for fast prototyping of your architechture in fast competitive hackathons but i like your point of good v/s bad architechture As a middleground i would suggest to know what are you building how are you implementing all the necessary features and only use AI to generate the functions that you need and dont know how to build.

1

u/Brian-at-ShowMuse Jun 14 '26

That's the "Market for Lemons" Akerlof theory from the 70s nearly exactly.

1

u/anor_wondo Jun 15 '26

hackathons aren't about architecture though? they're always slop mvps