The Great Hackathon Revival: Building at the Speed of Thought

For years, hackathons followed a predictable, somewhat frustrating script: spend the first six hours fighting with environment variables, incompatible node versions, or the tedious "plumbing" of a React app. By the time you actually got your app to compile, the pizza was cold and most of the redbull cans were empty.

The Mid-2010s "Drought"

I’ve personally felt that the energy around hackathons has been in a steady decline since the mid-2010s. For a while, the "spark" seemed to fade for obvious reasons (e.g. COVID) and some not-so-obvious reasons: the industry matured and priorities shifted. We reached a plateau where the effort to build a truly novel POC often outweighed the 48-hour window of a weekend event which just felt like too long.

But right now, with the advent of powerful AI, that has changed. The time is ripe—not just for a "return" to hackathons, but for a massive, heavy investment into them.

No more "Boilerplate Tax"

One of the bigger blockers to innovation has historically been the "Boilerplate Tax"—the hours of low-value scaffolding required to get a single "Hello World" to show up on a screen.

AI hasn’t just lowered this tax; it has effectively abolished it. We are now in a world where you can describe a complex architecture, and the AI handles the routing, the state management, and the CSS scaffolding in seconds. As Matt Shumer recently noted in Something Big Is Happening, AI has "graduated." It has moved from a helpful autocomplete to a system capable of making decisions that feel like judgment.

The time to go from a napkin sketch to a functional POC has shrunk from 48 hours to 4.8 minutes.

The Great Debate: In Defense of Not Reading Code

Here is where things get controversial. As we move faster, the traditional "manual inspection" of every line of code is becoming a bottleneck. In his interesting essay, In Defense of Not Reading the Code, Ben Shoemaker argues that we are entering a phase where we don't necessarily need to audit every character of AI-generated output.

To a seasoned developer, the idea of "not reading the code" sounds like heresy. It feels like an invitation for technical debt and security vulnerabilities. But the reality is that we are already past the point of human scale. The tension isn't about being lazy; it's about where you spend your limited cognitive energy. If you spend your time auditing a thousand lines of standard API routing, you have zero energy left for the high-level logic where the real bugs—and the real innovations—live.

Defining the New "TDD"

If we aren't reading every line, how do we ensure the system won't break? This is where the hackathon becomes a laboratory. We are using these high-pressure environments to define a New TDD (Test-Driven Development)—one specifically designed for AI.

In this new paradigm:

• Conventions over Code: We are building guardrails and "battle-hardening" protocols to wrap around AI functionality.

• Outcome-Based Validation: Instead of testing the logic of a function, we are refining how we test the behavior of an agent.

• Refinement via Iteration: Hackathons provide the perfect "stress test" to see which of these new conventions actually hold up when a prototype hits the real world.

Companies: Lure the Best by Unlocking the Best

To truly lure in the best engineers, organizations must remove the barriers around token usage and models. Participants shouldn’t be throttled by rate limits or restricted to mid-tier models to save a few dollars. To reach that "next-level" innovation, developers need virtually unlimited tokens and access to the absolute best AI models available. When you remove the cost of curiosity, you unlock a level of experimentation that a standard corporate environment could never replicate.

I also believe that organizations that are not actively hosting and investing in hackathons are going to fall behind in the innovation race. In an era where a weekend can produce what used to take a quarter, the companies that don't provide the space for this rapid-fire creation will find themselves disrupted by those that do.

Why Face-to-Face is Vital and Essential

With AI moving at a exponential pace, the "digital noise" can be deafening. Paradoxically, the best way to keep up with high-speed silicon is through old-school, biology-based interaction.

It is absolutely vital that hackathons make a comeback. The speed of AI is changing things so drastically that it feels like by the time a piece of documentation is published, it's obsolete. The best way for humans to keep up is to meet in person, share the "unwritten" rules of the new stack, and cross-pollinate ideas.

A "Web 2.0" Moment for the 2020s

I believe that doubling down on hackathons today will bring about a wave of rapid innovation comparable to the era of the iPhone and Internet 2.0. We are at a transition point where the tools are finally powerful enough to keep up with our imaginations.

The "graduation" of AI means that the "February 2020 moment" for tech is here. In the same way that February 2020 was the final, deceptive calm before a global pandemic fundamentally rewrote the rules of society, we are currently in the final moments of "business as usual" for software engineering. The capabilities have already crossed the threshold; the world just hasn't caught up to the implications yet.

What is the "February 2020 Moment"? It refers to a period of "Pre-Recognition." In Feb 2020, the virus was already spreading, the data was clear to those watching, but the world was still operating on old assumptions. Matt Shumer argues we are in that exact window with AI: the "old way" of building software is already obsolete, and we are about to experience a massive, viral shift in how everything is built.

We are no longer limited by our typing speed; we are limited only by our ability to frame problems and verify solutions. Hackathons are the front lines of this revolution—the places where we stop debating the theory of AI and start building the future of engineering, together.