Finishing a hackathon project used to mean something. Now it just means you had a good prompt.
Someone on my timeline said the golden age of hackathons is dead. 2021 to 2023, they said, was the easiest way to build a network, learn fast, and land a job without touching Leetcode. Then AI nuked it. Building got so easy that the "idea guys" took over, and nobody's sure what replaces hackathons for someone starting out today.
I don't fully agree. But I get exactly what they're mourning.
Back before AI tools were part of my workflow, I entered a few hackathons, some Google ones among them, and honestly my memory of most of it is pretty vague now. What I do remember clearly is not finishing. Not because the idea was bad. I was stuck in tutorial hell, dealing with imposter syndrome on top of it.
I still call those hackathons rewarding. Not because I shipped something, most of the time I didn't, but because they showed me what was actually obtainable in this industry. Real working software, built by people my age, solving real problems in a weekend. Before that exposure, "good" was an abstraction. After it, "good" had a shape.
Right now I'm juggling a handful of hackathons at once. Agents for Humans, AI Builders, the Niger Delta VES fleet build, a few others. The biggest difference from those early days isn't the tech. It's that I actually finish now.
I get bored of most games after an hour. Building doesn't do that to me. Endless progress. Rewarding. Mine when it's done. People don't always get that building is the relaxing thing, not the job.
Which is exactly why finishing matters more now, not less. If building is the game, unfinished hackathons are just levels I never beat. At this point somebody needs to electrocute me if I so much as glance at a new project before these are done.
AI didn't fix tutorial hell. It just made it optional. The blocker isn't syntax anymore, or four hours lost debugging an import error at 2am. That friction is mostly gone.
But AI enhances more than speed. It enhances your ability to build the wrong thing, confidently, on schedule, with a working demo to show for it.
That's basically what the "idea guys taking over" complaint is pointing at. Finishing used to be proof you understood what you built, because finishing was hard. Now finishing is available to anyone with a good prompt and no real judgment about whether the thing being built is worth building.
Tutorial hell was miserable. I'm not nostalgic for it. But debugging your own broken import statement at 2am taught you what actually breaks and why. A working AI-generated demo doesn't.
I don't think the answer is bringing that friction back on purpose. I don't think the industry has figured out what replaces it either. AI removed the thing that used to force people to learn slowly. Nobody's built the thing that forces people to learn fast without skipping the part where you actually understand what you shipped.
Hackathons still do the thing that mattered most for me. They show you what's obtainable, who's building it, what the bar actually looks like up close. That part isn't dead. I'm getting it right now, across every one of these I'm juggling.
What's dead is the assumption that finishing proves anything. Finishing used to mean something. Now it just means you had a good prompt.
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