r/hackathon • • Aug 21 '26

Meta-Hackathon Discussion Why doesn’t everyone just use AI for the entire ideation process at hackathons?

7 Upvotes

I’ve never participated in a hackathon before, and my first one is in about a month, so I might be misunderstanding how these events actually work. One thing I’ve been wondering about is the ideation phase.

When the challenge/problem statement is released, why wouldnt a team immediately give the entire thing, including the context, constraints, judging criteria, available data, etc. to several frontier models like claude or chat gpt?

For example, you could ask different models to, generate 20–30 different approaches, analyze the domain and likely user pain points, criticize the ideas and identify failure modes, rank them by novelty, feasibility, and expected hackathon performance, predict what obvious ideas other teams will probably build, and then use another model to synthesize everything and choose the strongest direction. You could also feed mentor feedback back into the models as you get it. Then once you have a direction, coding agents can build a prototype extremely quickly.

What I’m struggling to understand is where the bottleneck is supposed to be. As students, we probably don’t have more banking/healthcare/engineering/etc. domain knowledge than a frontier model, and the model is obviously much faster at exploring a large solution space.

So why isn’t something like this, already the default strategy at hackathons? : problem -> multiple AI models -> AI critique/ranking -> select idea -> coding agent -> prototype

Is it actually common now and I just havent seen it yet? Does it tend to produce generic ideas because everyone gets similar outputs? Is the main advantage of the human team gathering information from mentors/users and feeding new information back into the models? Or are there other limitations that only become obvious once you’ve actually participated in a hackathon?

Would especially like to hear from people who have done hackathons recently, now that coding agents and frontier models have gotten this capable.


r/hackathon • • 1h ago

Meta-Hackathon Discussion Hackcellence Booking.com Round 2

• Upvotes

So we got the Hackerearth page for Round 2 and we have total number of 2.5 thousand selected people for this.

Now I have one question How many students are going to select for Final Round and what would be criteria too.?

And Have you filled out Techstack Form Yet? And if yes then what was your answer.??

79 votes, 1d left
Java
python
c++
Node.js

r/hackathon • • 5m ago

Need Mentor Help How can I find hackathons, coding competitions, and AI/ML opportunities in Ethiopia as a Grade 12 student?

• Upvotes

hey everyone! I'm a Grade 12 student in Ethiopia interested in AI/ML, coding, and robotics.

Where can I find hackathons, coding competitions, or innovation challenges in Ethiopia or online that as students can join?


r/hackathon • • 1h ago

Hackathon Promotion Welcome to Hackways Discover. Participate. Build.

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• Upvotes

r/hackathon • • 3h ago

Project Demo Eyantra pacbot task 2a...anyone need it just dm me....

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1 Upvotes

r/hackathon • • 7h ago

Looking for Teammates Heading to ETHGlobal Mumbai? Our IIIT Gwalior team needs 2 more Web3 devs!

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1 Upvotes

r/hackathon • • 16h ago

Looking for Teammates Looking for 3 Team members for Bolna x YC Hackathon, you can be good at Frontend, Backend or AI anything works

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4 Upvotes

Link: https://www.bolna.ai/symphony/buildathon#apply-form

if interested DM me with your experience or intro


r/hackathon • • 20h ago

Need Mentor Help Help me !! I’m being harassed and tortured

8 Upvotes

Acceptance Proofs
TLDR:

• ⁠We’re two 19-year-old undergraduate AI/ML researchers from a Tier-3 college in a remote town in India. We’ve won two national-level hackathons, and three of our papers have been accepted at NeurIPS workshops.
• ⁠We’re facing ongoing harassment and academic pressure at our college, including threats of detention when we refuse unrelated, unpaid projects. We receive virtually no institutional support.
• ⁠We need approximately $3,100 for both of us to attend the workshops in Paris this December. Our college has refused funding, government schemes haven’t worked out, and our NeurIPS financial assistance application was declined.
• ⁠We’ve invested our own money in research and GPU rentals but cannot afford international travel.
• ⁠We need help finding travel grants, sponsors, research funding, or connections that could make attending possible.
• ⁠We’d also appreciate guidance on transferring colleges in our second year to find a more supportive research environment.
• ⁠We can provide acceptance letters and supporting documents for verification.

Edit:- i know this is not research place but im expecting some help as i’ve been part of this community and we’ve won 2 national level hackathon. So my fellow people please help me.

So me and my friend are two AI/ML researchers from a very remote town in india and here we find it very difficult to do research. We are two 19 year old undergraduate students from a third tier college. I’ve conducted three research programs till the date and made 10 papers and we submitted three papers at neurips workshop called “SLM Agents” and “DIFFULM” we’ve got all three accepted now the remaining 6 are not yet submitted anywhere and after doing all this as an undergrad i have zero institutional support like zero they didn’t gave us organization mails and then we have to do internship at an company to get organization mails to create account on open review so this is the level of support we are talking the college makes us do projects like naking student consultancy software and all that and we cannot say no even if we have zero intrest and do not get paid even a single penny because the politics in our college is just disgusting they’ve tried to detain us for saying no and they are harassing us on daily basis and we cant even go to police because they wont do anything because it’s india also we need to fly to paris for workshop as its mandatory for atleast one researcher to attend offline and as we both are very new to this we both are very much excited to attend this we are not financially enough stable to go to paris and the total cost for both of us including everything is around $3100 and our institution has said no to even give a single penny and weve ran tests on rented gpu and all that ik not trying to gain any sympathy but im trying to explain all of you about my financial condition also the event is in dec so we have 2 months and we’ve tried every government funding scheme and we are not eligible as almost all of them are for masters and phd students and we’ve tried neurips financial assistance and they have also declined to help us we really need your help please of you can please help us in anyways if it’s possible for you and if its possible to switch college in 2nd year
Also it looks like i can add image here im new here and idk how to attach images of acceptance letter but if you all can help me guide this ill attach the proof of acceptance too.


r/hackathon • • 19h ago

Need Mentor Help Anyone got any updates regarding Hackerrank chakra SDE intern interview

6 Upvotes

r/hackathon • • 20h ago

Hackathon Promotion Exun 2026

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2 Upvotes

r/hackathon • • 23h ago

Looking for Teammates Looking for teammates — Life After Code (GitLab × Devpost)

3 Upvotes

Hey! I'm a 3rd-year Electrical and Computer Engineering student looking for teammates for the Life After Code hackathon.

I have experience with Python, Django, Spring Boot, Flutter, and full-stack development. I'm interested in building a strong, working project with people who enjoy collaborating and shipping real software.

I'm open to remote teammates from anywhere. If you're participating in Life After Code and still looking for a team, DM me with your skills and what you'd like to build.

GitHub: https://github.com/tad12e

Let's build something great!


r/hackathon • • 1d ago

Meta-Hackathon Discussion So When does Hackcellence Booking.com Hackathon is Organized

6 Upvotes

Like on their Website they said 2 days but what i received on mail is on 18 October they have organized Virtual Hackathon.
So anyone knows like they have scheduled 2 Days separated or 1 day only.

What about other, what you have received?


r/hackathon • • 20h ago

Looking for Teammates ScienceClaw Hackathon

2 Upvotes

Anyone planning to go for the ScienceClaw Hackathon on October 30 at MIT media lab?


r/hackathon • • 17h ago

Looking for Teammates Got my hackFront India Builder Pass,If you’re coming, let’s catch up!

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1 Upvotes

r/hackathon • • 20h ago

Looking for Teammates Looking for a Team to contribute in Google AI Builder Cup 2026

1 Upvotes

Hey Everyone, So as the title suggests looking to join a team for the Google AI Builder Cup 2k26.


r/hackathon • • 20h ago

Hackathon Promotion Hackathon @ Notion HQ for women in stem

1 Upvotes

Hi everyone! Originally posted this in r/womenEngineers, but thought I'd share it here - I'm planning to organize the biggest high school girls hackathon ever in San Francisco mid November, 20th-22nd.

It's called Snowglobe, and it's at Notion's headquarters! If yall know any high schoolers that might be interested, or mentors in the area, please let me know! I want this to be a super special opportunity for girls to be themselves as computer scientists.

If you yourself are a high school girl in stem, please sign up! We want this event to be super successful and impactive for as many girls as possible.


r/hackathon • • 1d ago

Hackathon Promotion Metis L2 is inviting developers to build and deploy AI agents onchain

4 Upvotes

Hey builders! Metis L2 is currently running Metis Rise, a builder incentive program for developers interested in building and deploying AI agents onchain. You can use any AI framework, and applications are currently open. Happy to share more details with anyone interested!


r/hackathon • • 21h ago

Hackathon Promotion Exun 2026 is happening this month! 21 tech events, including Sudocrypt v16.0

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1 Upvotes

Hey everyone!

We’re Exun Clan, the tech club at DPS R.K. Puram, Delhi, and we’re back with the 31st edition of Exun, our annual international tech symposium!

We’ve got 21 events for high school students lined up this year, covering everything from competitive programming and machine learning to cybersecurity, design, robotics, hardware and gaming. Sudocrypt v16.0, our international CTF, is back too!

The online rounds run from October 21–28, followed by onsite finals in Delhi on October 31. You can participate regardless of nationality, so this isn’t just for people in India.

Whether you're into CTFs, CP, ML, or just want to try something new and compete with other tech enthusiasts, we'd love to have you join us!

We're also lucky to have Intel powering this edition, with Jane Street as an event partner.

Links: - Registration: https://reg.exunclan.com/ - All events: https://exun.co/26/events - Schedule: https://exun.co/26/schedule - WhatsApp community: https://exun.co/26/whatsapp

We’ve put a lot into making this edition happen, and we’re excited to see what everyone builds, solves and comes up with. Feel free to ask us any questions!


r/hackathon • • 1d ago

Hackathon Promotion Hackathon Ideas

2 Upvotes

Hey everyone!

I’m a university student, and we’re planning a hackathon at our university. We want to make the whole experience fun and interesting, not just coding for hours.

We’re looking for ideas related to the hackathon itself, like how to choose judges, make the judging process fair, organize the final presentations, give prizes, or add fun challenges during the event. We’re also looking for ideas for activities and decoration themes to make the place look cool.

If you’ve ever taken part in or organized a hackathon, I’d love to hear your ideas and advice!

I’d really appreciate any suggestions.


r/hackathon • • 22h ago

Hackathon Promotion Deadline – 30 Oct 2026] BPCL × IIM Visakhapatnam Ideathon | ₹1.8 Lakh Prize Pool + Incubation, Publication & Patent Support

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0 Upvotes

If you're a student interested in energy, sustainability, engineering, research or entrepreneurship, this could be a good opportunity to develop and showcase your idea.

What is the ideathon about?

The competition focuses on innovative solutions that can contribute to India's energy security and sustainable energy future.

Selected ideas may be considered for additional support, subject to the organisers' selection and applicable criteria.

New to the competition? Attend the online Open House!

*Date:* 23 October 2026

*Mode:* Online

The session will cover:

- An introduction to the ideathon and its themes

- Competition rules and participation process

- An overview of the case competition

- How to prepare and submit your one-slide idea

- A Q&A session to clear your doubts

Even if you have already submitted your idea, you can resubmit it. The Open House is a useful opportunity to understand the process and ensure your submission is prepared correctly.

Registration links

*Ideathon registration:*

https://unstop.com/conferences/atmanirbhar-urja-forging-indias-sovereign-energy-future-national-techno-managerial-ideathon-leadership-confe-1742600

*Open House registration:*

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdlqGgz7539eYqx4osAglG65IE1J-HAg48h40cUdt86w_8ITA/viewform

*Official details:*

https://www.iimv.ac.in/ntmil-ideathon/

Have an idea worth exploring? Start with one slide and take the first step toward turning it into something bigger. Share this with fellow students who might be interested!


r/hackathon • • 23h ago

Project Demo Finding hackathon teammates is still done in random WhatsApp groups, so I built a board for it. Roast it.

1 Upvotes

Every hackathon goes the same way: “need 1 frontend dev” gets posted in five WhatsApp groups, nobody knows who can actually build, and half the teams form the night before.

So I built CrewForge:

crewforge.online

Hackathons sync daily from Unstop. About 75 open coding hackathons right now. Business-plan contests and quizzes are filtered out, and each card shows the deadline, team size and mode.

Post your team with the roles you’re missing (frontend, ML, design…).

Solo? Apply to a team with your role and a short note. The team owner accepts or declines, and gets your contact only if you choose to share it.

No real names or emails are shown. Everyone appears as an anonymous builder handle, and your GitHub or portfolio is optional.

Free, and open to every college.

It’s early, and very few teams are on it yet, which is exactly why I’m posting. If you’re heading into a hackathon in the next few weeks, put your team up and see who applies.

What I’d love from you:

Would you actually use this over WhatsApp or Discord?

What would make you trust a stranger as a teammate?

What’s broken? Tell me.

https://crewforge.online


r/hackathon • • 1d ago

Hackathon Promotion Running a nonprofit hackathon in SF Oct 24-25, here are this year's problem statements

3 Upvotes

Hi all, I help organize Hack for Social Impact. It's a weekend hackathon where teams build for real nonprofits. Each partner brings a scoped problem and stays involved through the weekend. This is our third year.

This year's challenges:

  • UN Convention to Combat Desertification: a community land planning game built on real satellite and GIS data
  • East Bay Permaculture Guild: lightweight tools to onboard new volunteers and turn event details into outreach
  • Boundless Freedom Project: keeping mindfulness practice accessible for people in their first 30 days after release from prison, with no smartphone or reliable internet assumed
  • Transformative Programming Works: joining parole and recidivism data so nonprofits can measure actual impact
  • BRIDGEGOOD: taking an in-person community design practice to people who can't be in the room

It's free and in person at 1885 Mission St in SF, Oct 24 9am to Oct 25 6pm. There are $5K in prizes and sponsor credits, and food is covered. Solo or team, technical or not.

Happy to answer questions about the format or any of the challenges. Link in the comments.


r/hackathon • • 1d ago

Hackathon Promotion NASA Space Apps Yonkers 2026 | Free Virtual Hackathon | Nov 14–15

4 Upvotes

NASA Space Apps Yonkers 2026 | Free Virtual Hackathon | Nov 14–15

Hey everyone!

Just wanted to share an upcoming hackathon for anyone interested in AI, coding, space tech, or building cool projects!

NASA Space Apps Yonkers is happening on November 14–15, and the best part is that you can participate virtually from anywhere. It's completely free, and beginners are welcome too!

It's a great chance to team up with others, work on interesting challenges, and gain some hands-on experience. Even if you've never joined a hackathon before, this could be a good place to start.

Thought I'd share in case anyone here wants to give it a try!

Event details & registration:
https://www.spaceappschallenge.org/2026/local-events/yonkers/


r/hackathon • • 1d ago

Need Mentor Help Anybody wanna make a pokemon algorithm with me🫠🫠🫠🫠🫠

2 Upvotes

Hey everyone! 👋

For the next 3 hours, I’ll be working on an algorithm for a hackathon where I’ll build a team of 3 Pokémon and create an algorithm to control their moves and strategies to battle against other Pokémon teams. ⚔️🔥

If anyone is interested in joining me, helping out, learning together, or even just guiding me along the way, you’re more than welcome!

Honestly, I don’t really want to work on this alone. 🫠 I’d love to meet some cool people, make new friends, share ideas, and build something fun together.

You don’t have to be an expert — even if you’re just curious and want to learn, feel free to reach out! Let’s figure things out together. 🤝❤️


r/hackathon • • 1d ago

Meta-Hackathon Discussion HackCellence 2026 Round 1: Can Booking Holdings and HackerEarth provide transparent assessment results?

21 Upvotes

I participated in Round 1 of HackCellence 2026: The Embark Edition, organised by Booking Holdings India CoE in collaboration with HackerEarth.

I received my rejection email today, October 15. I respect that shortlisting is competitive, but I genuinely want to understand how the assessment was evaluated.

During the assessment, I completed both coding questions, passed the test cases available to me, and submitted with approximately 30 minutes remaining. Based on my own assessment, I also believe I answered around 85% of the MCQs correctly.

Despite this, I was not shortlisted for Round 2. The rejection email stated that the cutoff was high, but I cannot find my score or a detailed assessment report on the candidate portal.

I am not asking for preferential treatment, a guaranteed selection, or a reversal of the decision simply because I am disappointed.

I am asking for transparency.

Specifically, I would appreciate access to the following, if technically and operationally possible:

  1. Question-wise results: My selected answer, the correct answer, and the marks awarded for each MCQ, wherever applicable.

  2. Coding evaluation: My submitted code, the number of test cases passed, the maximum marks available, and the marks awarded for each coding problem.

  3. Section-wise and total scores: My performance across coding, aptitude, and communication, including the maximum possible score.

  4. Scoring methodology: How partial credit, negative marking, coding test cases, and any time-based criteria were handled.

  5. Shortlisting criteria: The Round 2 cutoff or, if it cannot be disclosed, an explanation of how candidates were ranked and shortlisted.

I also hope the organisers can clarify what safeguards were used to ensure a consistent and fair assessment for all participants, including the handling of unauthorised outside assistance. I have no evidence that any particular candidate violated the rules, and I am not accusing anyone of cheating.

I understand that some assessment content or ranking information may be confidential. Even so, individual performance feedback and a clear explanation of the scoring process would help candidates understand their results and improve.

I have already contacted the organisers to request my score and evaluation details.

Booking Holdings and HackerEarth teams, if you see this, could you please clarify whether individual scorecards or question-wise reports can be provided to participants?

This is not about demanding that everyone be selected. It is about giving candidates a meaningful explanation of how their performance was assessed.

I would appreciate a response from anyone who has received an official score breakdown, rather than just a selection or rejection notification.