I participated in a hackathon today. It’s been about 3 years, I think, since my last hackathon, back when we didn’t have coding agents like Claude Code. I knew it’d be a totally different vibe, but even then, I was underestimating it.
From idea creation to demo, everything could be handled by the coding agent we used. And that made me wonder why I was even sitting there. I felt like I was just touching the prompt with minimal judgment, and nothing else. I think I felt more sad than surprised, though.
Until today, hackathons were remembered as those reckless nights where I, surrounded by my cracked friends (not necessarily experience or skill-wise, more their mindset and personality), would build solutions to the core problems we noticed around us, using any new or familiar technology. We’d spend hours or days learning different tools and use them to bring our ideas to life. It could be crappy, but still it was rewarding and I was proud of the thing we built. That frustration when it throws an error, that adrenaline when the game character finally moves.
But now it’s all gone. Maybe, probably, I’m overreacting after going to one hackathon, but no longer being able to breathe through those times kind of makes me sad. Kind of like how CTFs feel, I guess, but a bit less.
At the venue, I talked to many engineers working at all kinds of companies. Some of them said pursuing a PhD or joining Anthropic might be the only way to survive this wave. During the discussion, we all agreed that over time, more layoffs would happen, and that the layoffs at big tech right now are just a preview of what’s coming for the rest of the industry. That made me rethink my career path. Should I really pursue software engineering, when I know agents already can, or soon will, replace me?
It left me with a lot of concerns and thoughts, and I figured writing them down could help me check where I’m at right now and navigate through this.
And when we all race to win this AI trend, what happens to the people falling behind, people who lose their jobs due to AI? Who’s going to remember them? I feel like San Francisco is the embodiment of that bipolar phenomenon. Just like any other big city, San Francisco has plenty of founders and tech millionaires, but at the same time, I see so many homeless people everywhere in the city. For some reason, that duality feels more visible here than anywhere else I’ve been. It’s a strange city.