RIP software hackathons. Long live the hardware hackathon

A coder showed up to a Vilnius hackathon with an old rotary phone, spent 48 hours turning it into a bizarre AI music hotline, and somehow the real drama wasn’t the talking phone — it was the comments section instantly asking whether software hackathons are basically dead. The creator’s big claim was that people barely even need to touch code now, so the new frontier is strapping modern tools onto weird old gadgets: fax machines, cash registers, microwaves, even a Game Boy used like a stock-trading screen. In other words, less “build an app,” more “make a haunted appliance.”

And wow, the crowd had feelings. One commenter brutally renamed the whole genre “Prompt-a-ton,” which pretty much sums up the eye-roll faction: if AI is doing the typing, are these events still about skill, or just pitching chaos with confidence? Another user went even meaner, saying hearing someone explain an AI-made project is like hearing about a dream: lots of stuff happens, nobody else cares. Ouch. But the optimism squad pushed back hard, arguing that if making software is easier, people finally have room to build delightful real-world stuff — the kind of weekend inventions that make you ask, “wait, why didn’t this exist already?”

Then came the nerdiest slap-fight of all: was this even “hardware” at all? One skeptic called the irony unreal, basically accusing software people of putting a tiny computer in an old phone and declaring victory. Meanwhile, the funniest replies ran with the madness, especially the idea of friends texting each other through receipt printers and turning fax machines into social networks. The verdict: the community is split between “this is the future” and “this is just arts-and-crafts for AI people,” which honestly is exactly the kind of messy energy hackathons live for.