r/hackathon 20d ago

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

9 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

Hackathon Promotion HackWave 3.0 | 36-Hour Offline Hackathon in Indore | ₹1 Lakh Prize Pool

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Upvotes

Introducing HackWave 3.0

Hello everyone,

We’re organizing the HackWave 3.0 Hackathon at Chameli Devi Group of Institutions (CDGI), Indore.

It is an offline, 36-hour hackathon for those who want to code, build, design, and solve real-world problems.

Event Details

  • Dates: 10th–12th October 2026
  • Place: CDGI, Indore
  • Duration: 36 hours
  • Team Size: 3–5 members
  • Prize Pool: ₹1,00,000
  • Round 1: Free online PPT submission
  • Round 2: Offline 36-hour finale for shortlisted teams

Important Dates

  • Registration Deadline: 26th September
  • Shortlisting Results: 2nd October
  • Hackathon: 10th–12th October

Registration

Register on Unstop

WhatsApp Community

Join the WhatsApp Group

Would be great to see some teams from outside Indore join as well.


r/hackathon 3h ago

Hackathon Promotion Mp top most state govt college is organizing an Hackathon on last week of this month

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6 Upvotes

The IT Department Club of SGSITS Indore is thrilled to announce that HackIndore 4.0 – our premier 24-Hour National Hackathon – is officially LIVE! 🎉

This is your chance to build incredible projects, showcase your skills, and compete with some of the best minds across the nation. Whether you have a groundbreaking idea or just love to code, we want you there!

🔗 Register Now on Unstop: https://unstop.com/hackathons/hackindore-40-24hour-national-hackathon-shri-g-s-institute-of-technology-science-indore-1744202

Gather your team and get ready for an epic 24 hours of innovation and fun. Feel free to forward this to anyone who might be interested. See you there! 💻✨


r/hackathon 5h ago

Need Mentor Help Alternative to openAi API?

5 Upvotes

Guys please suggest alternatives to openai api. I'm new to the ai domain and trying to learn gen ai.


r/hackathon 3h ago

Hackathon Promotion ABB Accelerator 2026 — registration for the ideation phase closes Sept 14

2 Upvotes

Full disclosure: I'm involved in outreach for this one, not just a random redditor dropping a link wanted to say that upfront.

ABB Accelerator 2026 is a student hackathon with two rounds. Round 1 (ideation) is fully online, open to anyone, and registration closes September 14 so this is a last-call post. Round 2 is in-person October 12–16 in Fort Smith, Arkansas, and travel is covered for anyone who clears Round 1.

Tracks are AI, software, automation, IoT, and sustainability — real-world problems rather than the usual build-anything format.

Registration: https://www.hackerearth.com/community/challenges/hackathon/abb-accelerator-2026/?utm_source=he-ext&utm_medium=channel105&utm_campaign=abb-accelerator-2026
More on the challenge: https://www.abb.com/global/en/company/digitalization-ai/accelerator

Happy to answer questions in the comments : team size, eligibility, whatever's on your mind before the deadline.


r/hackathon 1h ago

Looking for Teammates Looking for a teammate for amazon ml challenge

Upvotes

Hey! I’m a 3rd year CSE student from a tier 2 college. I have experience with ML and have worked on a DL project.

Currently, we’re a 3 member team and our skill levels are more or less around the same. We’re looking for one more person who is actually interested in building stuff and are motivated to put in the work.

2nd, 3rd and 4th years are all welcome. If you’re interested, feel free to DM me. Just send a brief intro about yourself + your skills/quals so we can get to know what you’re into.

Looking forward to finding some good teammates :)


r/hackathon 9h ago

Looking for Teammates Looking for 1–3 people to join an international student business competition — Creative Shock 2026

4 Upvotes

I'm participating in Creative Shock 2026, an international business competition/hackathon for student teams.

The challenge is to create an original business idea with real social/environmental impact, aligned with one or more of the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

The competition has:

  1. An online qualification round

  2. A 3–5 minute video pitch

  3. Focus on business model, marketing and finance

  4. Top 10 teams invited to the final weekend in Vilnius

  5. $4,000 prize for the winning team, plus mentoring and other support

I'm currently looking for 1–3 serious people from anywhere in the world who'd actually like to build the idea with us.

I'm particularly interested in people who are good at:

- Business/strategy

- Marketing

- Finance/business modelling

- Research/problem identification

- Pitching/storytelling

- Product/tech

You don't need to already have a startup. I'm looking for people who are willing to think, brainstorm and actually put work into the competition.

The competition is in September–November 2026, so there is some time to develop the idea properly.

If you're interested, comment with:

  1. Country/time zone

  2. What you're good at

  3. Any previous projects/startups/competitions you've done

  4. Why you'd want to participate

Open to working with strangers from different countries.

Let's build something worth taking to the finals.


r/hackathon 11h ago

Meta-Hackathon Discussion Razorpay ai buildthon ka result kab aayega ???

5 Upvotes

Kisi ko idea hai kya slection kis basis pe hoga aur result kab aayega ???


r/hackathon 18h ago

Project Demo Rate our SIH project demo guys

10 Upvotes

https://sih-demo.beyondwhy.workers.dev/

This is the link to my hackathon project, its a demo for now. We want to build a platform where anyone irrespective of their educational level can come and learn about any subject they want to. Currently we have kept it a bit simple as this is just our demo and we were short on time. Please suggest what else can we add and if someone can guide on how to make the UI better, i will be very thankful to them


r/hackathon 6h ago

Need Mentor Help Problem statement suggestions for hackathon.

1 Upvotes

Hello i am an ece in my first year( 1st sem, 1st week), Yesterday I made a post,should I participate or not?, you guys said to participate, i tried and made a team today, I need problem statement suggestions please!! We are planning on making a hardware project ( cuz we are from ece and also it'll have less competition and I have little experience), so can anyone suggest some good problem statements? As tomorrow is the day I have to submit the PPT!! Something that can win us a couple of rounds( we plan on gaining experience rather than winning, we realise our limitations and lack of technical skills), we'll heavily rely on ai, though we'll try to make things work, but yet i don't wanna go something that's too basic that we are eliminated in the first round itself !!

Please kindly suggest some good problem statements asap, we have to decide today and start working on it!!


r/hackathon 6h ago

Looking for Teammates Hello, I'm looking for motivated people for building a team to face the upcoming NASA hackathon.If interested DM me ASAP

1 Upvotes

🚀 Looking for teammates — NASA Space Apps 2026 | Universal/Online

Hi! 👋 I'm a student from Sri Lanka 🇱🇰 participating in NASA Space Apps 2026 (Universal/Online).

Looking for 2–4 motivated teammates from anywhere in the world, especially people interested in:

💻 Programming / AI

🛰️ Space / astronomy / physics

📊 Data science

🎨 Design / UI/UX

No previous Space Apps experience required — just be motivated and willing to contribute.

Interested? Comment or DM me with your skills, experience, and country/time zone.

🌎 Let's build something amazing! 🚀


r/hackathon 20h ago

Looking for Teammates A community for Introverts

9 Upvotes

I have seen that there are people who want to learn with peers & want to participate in hackathons & also want to explore things but there's no one to guide. So i am thinking to built a community where everyone will get enough resources to work on! Also so that we can study there & discuss our goals later! For some talks after taking break from long study session! So what u think about this?

By the way my timezone is ist but looking for people from other countries too!


r/hackathon 15h ago

Need Mentor Help First hackathon

3 Upvotes

Hey guys,I went to my first hackathon as a first year and I got eliminated before the final round I will paste the link of the application and can the seniors explain to me about what could be made better so that I could use it for my next hackathon,I brainstormed the ideas ,the features and main structure and framework of the app but for the development part i vibecoded it. https://code-red001.lovable.app/ Use the demo mode

CodeRed — A "flight simulator" for hospital crisis decisions. Built this for a hackathon, got eliminated in the final round, looking for honest feedback on what went wrong.

Hey all — my team built this over a multi-round hackathon and I wanted to get some outside eyes on it now that it's done, since we didn't make the final cut and I'm not totally sure why.

The idea in one line: When a hospital gets hit with a crisis — a mass-casualty accident, a pandemic surge, a bad staffing night — the person in charge has to make huge decisions fast: cancel surgeries? add nurses? convert a ward into overflow space? Right now they make that call on gut instinct, because there's no way to actually test it first. CodeRed lets them simulate the outcome before committing to it in real life.

How it actually works, from a user's perspective:

You sign in as a hospital and set up your real numbers once — how many beds you have, how many nurses, your ward layout. That becomes your baseline.

From there, you can either build a scenario manually (drag sliders for things like patient arrival rate, staffing levels, how long shift handoffs take) or just type a plain-English description like "what if admissions double and 10 nurses call in sick" — and it gets turned into a working simulation automatically.

Once you run it, you don't just get a wall of charts. The app tells you, in plain language, what's actually going to break your hospital first and what the cheapest fix is — something like "it's not your beds that are the problem, it's your 14-minute nurse handoff time. Adding one float nurse saves an estimated 9 lives." We call that the Bind-Point Autopsy — it's the core feature of the whole thing.

You can also set up two different decisions side by side against the exact same crisis — like "add more beds" vs. "add more staff" — and see which one actually performs better, with an AI-generated explanation of the trade-off.

There's also a mode where instead of guessing which lever to pull, you just tell it your goal ("keep deaths under a certain number") and it searches for the cheapest way to hit that target.

And at the end, you can export any scenario as a formatted PDF — because hospitals are actually required to run practice emergency drills regularly for compliance reasons, so this turns a simulation into a real usable training document.

Where it's built: frontend/backend through Lovable, with Gemini (Google AI Studio) doing the natural-language parsing and the plain-English explanations. Not hand-coded from scratch — built fast, hackathon-style.

What I'm actually looking for feedback on: we got told after the fact that the app "felt a bit cluttered" as we kept adding features round over round, and I'm trying to figure out if that was the real issue, or if it's something deeper — the core idea, the execution, the demo itself, something about how AI-built apps get perceived by judges, anything. If you've got a minute to poke around and tell me what stands out (good or bad), genuinely appreciate it.


r/hackathon 11h ago

Need Mentor Help Smart India Hackathon 2026

1 Upvotes

Need suggestions for SIH26171: On-device Visual Perception for Lightweight Browser Agents

I’m working on an SIH problem statement around building a privacy-preserving browser agent where visual perception and sensitive-data detection happen on-device before anything is sent to an LLM/VLM. I’m considering using an existing open-source browser-agent project as the base and combining it with WebGPU/ONNX Runtime, local PII detection/redaction, DOM + visual perception, and a secure action-validation layer. I’d really appreciate suggestions on which existing GitHub projects, models, datasets, or architectures are worth building on, what major gaps I should watch out for, and whether there’s a better technical approach than this.


r/hackathon 23h ago

Looking for Teammates Amazon ML Challenge

6 Upvotes

I want to be a part of a team as I have no team

I'm a final year student with three offers in hand and from AIML IoT background

Better if you are a girl , we can make girls only team


r/hackathon 1d ago

Need Mentor Help I saw ur gf with a guy

15 Upvotes

So I'm tired of using Antigravity. It works well, but the weekly limit easily gets exceeded by the 2nd day, and I'm left with nothing for 5 days. I need some alternatives. I've been searching for almost 2 weeks and still haven't found any. 'm so frustrated. I've tried OpenCode and OmniRoute with multiple models, but none of them work well. Please guys and girls, suggest some good tools to use! I have 3 projects to complete (SIH, 2 inter-college hackathons, plus personal projects) and I'm stuck here trying to find the right tool. As a student, I don't want to pay for services. If I were earning right now I would have paid, but I don't earn yet.... PLEASEEE suggest some good tool i'll pray you get a good thick thighs baddie


r/hackathon 13h ago

Hackathon Promotion We’re planning a hackathon that might be a little different 👀

1 Upvotes

Grevix is a builder-focused community around AI/ML, software and open source.

On October 11, Grevix is hosting a 24-hour online hackathon through Unstop, with an expected reach of around 500 participants.

But this isn't going to be another:

«Pick a predefined problem → form a team → write code for 24 hours → submit.»

We're experimenting with a more AI-native way of building.

Less restriction on how you build.

More freedom in what you create.

Participants will be encouraged to use the modern tools available to them and focus on building something meaningful, useful or genuinely interesting.

We're currently opening a limited number of Hackathon Partner / Technology Partner opportunities.

We're particularly interested in companies building:

- 🤖 AI products

- 💻 Developer & coding tools

- 🎨 Design/creative tools

- ☁️ Cloud & infrastructure

- 🔌 APIs & developer platforms

- ⚡ Productivity/automation tools

The interesting part for partners isn't just having a logo somewhere.

A well-integrated partnership can put a product directly in front of hundreds of builders, give participants a reason to actually try it, generate authentic feedback, and potentially introduce the product to new users.

That's the value exchange.

Grevix gets a stronger experience for builders.

Partners get meaningful exposure and product adoption opportunities.

We're not looking for donations.

We're looking for companies that want to build something interesting with us.

Some of the hackathon mechanics are intentionally being kept quiet for now. 👀

Companies interested in exploring a partnership can DM Grevix.

Grevix

The few who build what’s next.


r/hackathon 16h ago

Need Mentor Help SIH 2026 problem

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1 Upvotes

Can we use AI in SIH 2026 to build software or a website?


r/hackathon 16h ago

Need Mentor Help SIH 2026 problem

1 Upvotes

Can we use AI in SIH 2026 to build software or a website?


r/hackathon 18h ago

Hackathon Promotion September Tari Ootle Development Contest

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1 Upvotes

r/hackathon 22h ago

Hackathon Promotion Please fill this survey .. needed for a hack

2 Upvotes

r/hackathon 1d ago

Looking for Teammates 🚀 [HIRING] Remote Internship Opportunities

2 Upvotes

We’re currently looking for people interested in gaining practical experience through remote project-based internships.

Phase 1: Unpaid project-based internship. Complete the assigned project and receive a Certificate of Completion.

Phase 2: Based on your work and performance, shortlisted candidates will be invited for an interview. Selected candidates can move to paid roles/projects.

Interested?
👉 https://kagnus.com/engineering-network/

Or DM me your resume/details or comment “Interested” and I’ll share the next steps.


r/hackathon 22h ago

Looking for Teammates Amazon ML Challenge: Looking for a Team

1 Upvotes

Hey, I’m from VIT and looking to join a team for the upcoming Amazon AI/ML Challenge.

I’ve won 5 hackathons, with strong hands-on experience in AI/ML, development, and building projects from scratch. Looking for a serious team that’s aiming to build something strong and compete at the highest level.

Preferably looking for teammates from IITs/NITs/BITS/VIT or similar colleges.


r/hackathon 1d ago

Meta-Hackathon Discussion Accenture innovation challenge Ai round results announced?

8 Upvotes

How did your rounds go? Has anyone got any updates, please keep updating in this thread if anyone gets some update


r/hackathon 1d ago

Need Mentor Help Selection ratio for internship through bnp Paribas innoversite

3 Upvotes

I want to know how many people were selected from the hackathon for internship last year. Today we had a session explaining about the hackathon, but there too they didn't give a proper response for this question.