// HACKER NEWS — CYBERSECURITY
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.
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).
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.