HackEurope 2026: A short rant on AI and hackathons

By Antonio Cheong on Feb 23, 2026 on Permalink.

HackEurope is over. In many ways, it was a complete shitshow (vibe coded inaccessible UI for participants, lots of delays, miscommunications, and other issues too many to list). But now that the caffeine overdose and sleep deprivation is over, I can say that there were actually some important lessons.

TL;DR:

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.
Choose your track wisely. Make sure that the track sponsor IS ACTUALLY AT YOUR LOCATION. Most people were under the impression that tracks were per-country when in fact there was a single €1000 prize shared across the 3 countries and the sponsor wasn't actually operating in some.
Choose a problem that is easy to explain. There were 2 minutes to explain. It is a losing game whether or not you explain context. Non-technical people will tune out confused regardless. We were extremely lucky with 2/3 of the evaluators actually knowing about open-source supply chain attacks and being excited about our solution.
Follow the trends. All winners had "AI" as a significant part of their solution.

That being said, I personally wouldn't follow my own advice. I went in with the goal of building something that I would want to maintain long term. Not just AI slop (I fucking hate Lovable).

AI encourages conformity and kills creativity

A solid 90% of the projects there were just vibe coded slop. Even the ideas were AI. You can tell when multiple people implemented the exact same idea with the exact same title, description, and implementation.

While people call me a luddite, I do not particularly hate AI as a tool. My problem is that it has significantly lowered the bar for certain project types and therefore incentivize people who would have otherwise built something cool to instead fit into a mold constrained by the capabilities of AI.

A lot of cool ideas are out of distribution from the training data, and those rarely show up at hackathons anymore. The AI says they're "too hard" and people simply avoid these.

The grand winner was an idea to use LLMs for predicting wildfires caused by lightning strikes, and subsequently using LLMs to orchestrate drones to do cloud seeding and prevent wildfires. Cool UI and all, but there was (at least from observation), nothing actually behind it.

In a now edited post by Anthropic's head of Startup Sales, he mentioned that the winning team (LLM cloud seeding) had only 1 software engineer and 3 non-technicals. The accessibility is cool to see, but it is not expected at all for any of these projects to exist long-term. Just a marketing stunt to claim that code is now a commodity.

It feels like hackathons used to be a place where real startups are made or at least a proxy for the ability of individuals. Now, with everything being front-end only demos, there is no expectation at all for any follow up, and nothing is said of ability except for pitching and trend chasing.

Some other funny ideas I saw:

Stopping AI prompt injecting by scanning every prompt with an LLM (there were multiple duplicates of this)
Using LLMs to control satellites and move them when a Russian satellite gets too close (winner)
"Palantir for tech teams". "A real-time security guardian sitting silently on every dev's machine, scanning their screen, code, and communications to proactively prevent vulnerabilities."