[klustregrif]

> What he presented was 20 markdown skills.md bs files. I mean seriously, being literate is enough to get you the gold medal?

Yes? If your problem is that there a tree in road and one guy builds a autonomous robot to remove it and the other guy just goes and moves it, the “dumb” guy wins. We are at a point in history where a couple of markdown files solve problems better than hundreds of hours spent by experts in building dedicated solutions. But you win based on the results not based on how much effort you put into it.

[axegon_]

It's what I call "speed running towards watering plants with Gatorade".

[necovek]

You suggest doing it with water, perhaps? The same one we use in the toilets? Yuck!

[Silamoth]

Hackathons are about making and finishing something. That’s the whole premise: Instead of spending months working on a personal project that goes nowhere, give yourself a time constraint so you’re forced to finish something. Now you have something concrete to put on your portfolio (even if it’s still a proof-of-concept) - plus you’ve probably learned a lot.

Setting up config files for a tool is not making something. That’s like if I spent hours setting up my IDE, build processes, a CI/CD pipeline, and even unit tests. That might be cool and enhance my productivity down the line. But I still haven’t made anything.

[klustregrif]

> Setting up config files for a tool is not making something.

This is like complaining if someone used Unity at a game making hackathon. “They didn’t really bill anything they just configured an existing solution!”. At the core hacking hackathons are about what you deliver not the effort put into it. It’s crazy how people want to turn it into a purity question. People feel threatened because AI has removed a barrier for those whiners not as good at programming as they see themselves. But hackathons where never won by the rules of people who go “I am going to build my own game engine because using existing tools and libraries feels like cheating!”

[whattheheckheck]

What is the gold that were all mining for?

Ah yes higher fidelity, external stimulus + human response tuples to feed the ad revenue machine

[qsera]

But the winner didn't remove the tree. They just built a an AI team of tree-cutters...

[7thpower]

That may not actually cut trees.

[inigyou]

Yes. They wrote an AI prompt to cut a tree and gave a presentation about how this is the future of tree cutting. They did not cut the tree, nor build a robot that cut the tree. They fantasised about building a robot that builds a robot that cuts the tree.