r/hackathon • • Aug 21 '26

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

8 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 • • 23m ago

Need Mentor Help Anyone got any email regarding the TCS Codevita ???

• Upvotes

r/hackathon • • 2h ago

Looking for Teammates Looking for teammates for NASA Space Apps Challenge |

3 Upvotes

Hey everyone! We’re currently a team of 3 for the NASA Space Apps Challenge and are looking for a few more people to join us!!!

We’re open to beginners and intermediate-level folks who are interested in space, coding, AI/ML, design, research, or problem-solving. You don’t need to be an expert ..just be willing to learn, collaborate, and build something together.

If you’re interested, feel free to DM me with a little about yourself and your skills. Let’s build something cool together!❤


r/hackathon • • 8h ago

Meta-Hackathon Discussion Hackcellence Booking.com Round 2

10 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.??

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

r/hackathon • • 5h ago

Meta-Hackathon Discussion BNP paribas Hackathon Results

3 Upvotes

I heard some people have got their offer letters from BNP.

Any Idea Which City Hackathon are these people from or when will the Mumbai Hackathon participants will receive the results?


r/hackathon • • 5h ago

Meta-Hackathon Discussion BNP Innoversité 2026 Results — All Colleges or Only Some?

3 Upvotes

Has your college received the results yet? How many of you are still waiting for your TPO to share them?


r/hackathon • • 29m ago

Need Mentor Help Anyone got the RAKSHAM AI Cybersecurity Hackathon results yet?

• Upvotes

Hey guys, has anyone received any mail regarding the results/shortlisting for the RAKSHAM AI Cybersecurity Hackathon by IIT Delhi × Amazon?

Haven’t received any updates yet. Just checking if anyone else has. 👀


r/hackathon • • 1h ago

Need Mentor Help I made a discord hackathon focused community

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• Upvotes

r/hackathon • • 1h ago

Hackathon Promotion I made a discord hackathon focused community

• Upvotes

Dm for link


r/hackathon • • 1h ago

Hackathon Promotion We're running a student SRE hackathon with real Grafana dashboards, logs and traces. Round 1 is online till 18 Oct

• Upvotes

GDG on Campus IIIT Nagpur. We're running **KEEP ALIVE '26**, a national incident-response hackathon for students, at TantraFiesta 2026.

**What's different:** you don't build an app. Your team gets a broken microservices system's alerts, Grafana dashboards, logs and traces, works out what broke and why, and presents the fix. It's what an on-call SRE does on a bad night.

- **Who:** UG, PG and diploma students, teams of 2–3 from the same college

- **Level:** 6–12 months of DevOps learning; no production experience needed

- **Round 1:** a 30-minute online team assessment on Unstop, open till Sun 18 Oct, 11:59 PM IST

- **Finale:** top 15 teams at IIIT Nagpur on 26 Oct

- **Prizes:** ₹50,000 prize pool (₹25,000 cash + goodies for every finalist)

- **Partners:** Grafana (Official Platform Partner), CNCG Noida (Community Partner)

Register: https://unstop.com/hackathons/keep-alive-26-iiitn-1766226

Happy to answer anything in the comments, including how the incident platform works.


r/hackathon • • 3h ago

Meta-Hackathon Discussion Anyone received Round 2 assessment link

0 Upvotes

Anyone received Link for Round 2


r/hackathon • • 4h ago

Meta-Hackathon Discussion Welcome to the tour!

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ahptour.com
1 Upvotes

I'm a huge tennis fan. It's like the only sport my parents had on the tv when I was a kid in the 80s. So I kept watching as an adult. I'd say peak tennis tv watching for me was 2005. I watched every single summer US Open hard court tournament. At the September open that year Roger Federer defeated Andre Agassi. Ah memories.

I never made it on a pro tour myself. Did even worse than Michael Kosta. But competing in Hackathons? Now there's a place I could be better than number 864 in the world. But watching hackathons are boring. We need to change them to be more like tennis if people are going to watch and find the head to head battle exciting.

Fellow hackers, can you give this a read and tell me if I'm crazy. Would this ever work?


r/hackathon • • 7h ago

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

1 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 • • 10h ago

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

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1 Upvotes

r/hackathon • • 1d ago

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

12 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 • • 14h 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 • • 23h 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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3 Upvotes

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

if interested DM me with your experience or intro


r/hackathon • • 1d ago

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

4 Upvotes

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 • • 1d ago

Hackathon Promotion Exun 2026

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2 Upvotes

r/hackathon • • 1d 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

Looking for Teammates ScienceClaw Hackathon

2 Upvotes

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


r/hackathon • • 1d 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 • • 1d 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 • • 1d 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.