AI coding has made software hackathons trivial — hardware is the new frontier

At a 48-hour hackathon in Vilnius, a two-person team gutted an old rotary phone, wired in a Raspberry Pi, and connected it over a websocket to a server controlling two-way audio, the ringer, and the hook switch. The payoff was an AI concierge with a warm Yorkshire accent (voiced via ElevenLabs) that took spoken music requests through the handset and fulfilled them via the Spotify API — handling obscure asks like building a playlist of 70s Zambian psychedelic rock. The notable part: neither team member read a single line of the code that made it work.

The author argues this is now the defining shift in hackathon culture. With AI agents writing and refactoring code, the sleepless grind of typing has given way to whole-system thinking, and the web apps that won events two years ago have slid into mediocrity because software is increasingly a ‘solved’ layer. The freed-up effort, he contends, should go into hardware — particularly reviving old technology that once demanded rare, time-consuming domain expertise.

He predicts a wave of hardware-focused hackathons and offers deliberately absurd prompts: a fax-machine social network, a Game Boy Advance Bloomberg terminal, an AI voice-activated microwave. The thesis is that hackathons should resist VC-pitch sensibilities entirely — the point is gloriously overbuilt, commercially useless contraptions that demonstrate ambition, not business cases.