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.
There's a whole class of software people who think the rest of the world is a bunch of pitiful and sadly ignorant apes stuck in the past who just need the loving administration of the clarity, vision and genius of the software engineer to fix all their problems.
I'm living in this ecosystem right now, and I see this every day. The mentality that "normal people" are beneath them.
I live a fairly social life and enjoy going to karaoke and going on hikes with friends or strangers not in tech/startups, and many of the others in the residency simply can't understand why I'd want to interact with people they perceive as less intelligent than them.
"Think about it. Think of the most average person you know. 50% are more stupid than them. And you won't get any value out of speaking to those"
This is the reason why the rest of the world rolls their eyes when a software developer starts speaking...
There are the people doing actual work and science to move society forward, and then there's the people who stroll up and confidently peddle their idea to replace them with a barely thought-through app...
The scary part to me is that it actually works. Not practically, but that upper management and whatnot actually buy it.
Most early stage startups around me right now are built on the premise of replacing groups of people. There's a startup strapping sensors and cameras onto blue collar workers in developing countries to take "egocentric" data and train "world models" to the get robots to replace skilled physical labor. Lots of "ambient capture" to then automate away the work of the employees getting recorded.
Even what I'm building right now, which was initially just a tool to help me with my ADHD and memory problems is slowly getting twisted towards the same direction based on where the money is.
I would love to know how to build a company that serves real humans rather than the accumulation of capital and the extractive nature of corporations.
I’ve been at multiple hackathons over the past 15y that rewarded impractical or copies of existing products. And I think that’s fine? A hackathon doesn’t have to be about creating something revolutionary IMHO.
Still LLMs do remove most of the fun of hackathons
Its kind of insulting how many people look at other industries and think they can "solve" the problems with their simple solution. As if the people in these industries havent been thinking about this problem for decades.
Reminds me again of crypto. Lot of stuff being done in banking and payments happens for a reason. Or because someone from outside like politicians meddled into it. And forget that people are extremely gross when it comes to getting their bank balance wrong...
The human pilot is not an expensive part of it but it is a dangerous job and when mistakes or issues happen you lose a life you didn't need to lose. Out of all jobs to eliminate that doesn't sound so bad.
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 away daily at one's moral compass.
P.s. Gonna go sleep. The one place I always check is email, so if there's any particular feedback you want me to see, that's in my profile.
> 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
Yeah. I was an engineer in a startup for a good bit and after a certain point I realized that for us there wasn't any point in actually trying to make working products - a flashy render did so much more than anything working ever would, at least until tens of millions of funding had been raised. Many of the other startups pitching at the same events as us were using off-the-shelf software and saying it was theirs, if they had any demo at all instead of concept renders.
And at that point, having little experience in creating renders, I contented myself with going to conferences, following around my much more charismatic cofounder, and saying tech buzzwords to make the business types smile. They sure love their AI. More than one conference we went to had an itinerary of talks where literally every talk title had "AI" in the name.
I don't think it was a waste. I learned people skills, I can talk to a crowd, pitch ideas confidently to men in suits full of the right words if I have to, and I do think on some level it is actually the right call to not build. Whatever I would have hacked together with me and whoever else was around would not have been the basis for a good product and probably would have calcified bad decisions anyways - better to raise capital before building.
Oh it definitely wasn't a waste for me either. I've gone from an introvert stumbling over trying to explain technical concepts to being able to pitch abstract ideas that check all the right boxes for VCs and whatnot.
Opened a ton of doors after the hackathon. Would've never dreamed of coming over here to SF and being part of the whole startup/VC ecosystem.
The animation in the background is fun, but really impairs readability on mobile. At least there’s Reader mode in browsers, but a pity that the original form isn’t accessible!
Apologies! Not much of a UI guy and I thought I dimmed it sufficiently for the text to be readable. I might reduce the rows of eyes from 4 to 2 for mobile tomorrow morning or whatever helps. Let me know!
I do want a bit of personality in my site but definitely need to figure out how to make it more subtle
> 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.
This has been a lesson I learnt very early in my SWE career. This is nothing new sadly, but is a great lesson that not everything is technical expertise, but rather presentation and UI eye candy.
On the other hand, if AI enables ideas like wildfire prediction to the come into the public's view, it should be encouraged, right? imho, its seems to be the right app to have won.
There is already a lot of research on predicting [1] and monitoring [2] wildfires using traditional machine-learning approaches.
How would an LLM be useful in predicting wildfires? A project that incorrectly claims to solve a problem "using AI" has negative value.
By proposing a solution that will not actually work, these hackathon participants make a complex challenge seem trivial and take away attention from other, more mature work.
> A solid 90% of the projects there were just vibe coded slop. Even the ideas were AI.
I attended hackathons in the SF Bay Area where award winning participants had simply made powerpoints
So this doesnt surprise me
And I realized at that point there was an industry of aspirational coders selling a dream of talking to a VC at the hackathons, and I didnt need to be a part of that
I live a fairly social life and enjoy going to karaoke and going on hikes with friends or strangers not in tech/startups, and many of the others in the residency simply can't understand why I'd want to interact with people they perceive as less intelligent than them.
"Think about it. Think of the most average person you know. 50% are more stupid than them. And you won't get any value out of speaking to those"
There are the people doing actual work and science to move society forward, and then there's the people who stroll up and confidently peddle their idea to replace them with a barely thought-through app...
Most early stage startups around me right now are built on the premise of replacing groups of people. There's a startup strapping sensors and cameras onto blue collar workers in developing countries to take "egocentric" data and train "world models" to the get robots to replace skilled physical labor. Lots of "ambient capture" to then automate away the work of the employees getting recorded.
Even what I'm building right now, which was initially just a tool to help me with my ADHD and memory problems is slowly getting twisted towards the same direction based on where the money is.
I would love to know how to build a company that serves real humans rather than the accumulation of capital and the extractive nature of corporations.
Still LLMs do remove most of the fun of hackathons
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 away daily at one's moral compass.
P.s. Gonna go sleep. The one place I always check is email, so if there's any particular feedback you want me to see, that's in my profile.
Yeah. I was an engineer in a startup for a good bit and after a certain point I realized that for us there wasn't any point in actually trying to make working products - a flashy render did so much more than anything working ever would, at least until tens of millions of funding had been raised. Many of the other startups pitching at the same events as us were using off-the-shelf software and saying it was theirs, if they had any demo at all instead of concept renders.
And at that point, having little experience in creating renders, I contented myself with going to conferences, following around my much more charismatic cofounder, and saying tech buzzwords to make the business types smile. They sure love their AI. More than one conference we went to had an itinerary of talks where literally every talk title had "AI" in the name.
I don't think it was a waste. I learned people skills, I can talk to a crowd, pitch ideas confidently to men in suits full of the right words if I have to, and I do think on some level it is actually the right call to not build. Whatever I would have hacked together with me and whoever else was around would not have been the basis for a good product and probably would have calcified bad decisions anyways - better to raise capital before building.
Opened a ton of doors after the hackathon. Would've never dreamed of coming over here to SF and being part of the whole startup/VC ecosystem.
I do want a bit of personality in my site but definitely need to figure out how to make it more subtle
This is depressing, I'd expect people at these events to be more informed and less ignorant than the general public.
How would an LLM be useful in predicting wildfires? A project that incorrectly claims to solve a problem "using AI" has negative value. By proposing a solution that will not actually work, these hackathon participants make a complex challenge seem trivial and take away attention from other, more mature work.
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-92171-w [2] https://sites.research.google/gr/wildfires/
It's up to you to decide whether to play the game or make something actually worth making, for your own pride.
This is also true to a lesser extent of the wider world.
I attended hackathons in the SF Bay Area where award winning participants had simply made powerpoints
So this doesnt surprise me
And I realized at that point there was an industry of aspirational coders selling a dream of talking to a VC at the hackathons, and I didnt need to be a part of that