Back at Reboot Hackathon - Edinburgh Edition
Tuesday, November 11th found me back at Reboot Hackathon, this time in Edinburgh. It was an all day affair from 8:30AM to 6:30PM of pure energy, brainstorming, building, debugging, and that familiar hum of engineers in flow state.
I was there as a tech Coach for 3 teams, which meant I missed all the tech talks (story of my life at these events đ ). But honestly, being in the trenches with the teams, watching ideas transform into working prototypes - thatâs where the magic happens.
One of the teams made it to the top 3 and presented on the main stage. Proud moment. Their predecessors from the last Reboot I coached did the same and Won, so maybe I should start charging for this streak? đ
I noticed something shifting; there were significantly fewer questions being asked and fewer human interactions to the different coaches during the Hack. The engineers were heads-down, they were talking to ChatGPT, Claude, and other LLMs. Is this good or bad? I canât say definitively.
What I can say is thereâs a pattern emerging - a potential disconnect between the solutions being built and the actual users theyâre meant to serve. When youâre bouncing ideas off an AI thatâs been trained on the internet rather than someone whoâs lived through similar problems, you might get technically sound answers that miss the human nuance. LLMs are incredible brainstorming partners. But they donât push back the way a human would. They donât ask âbut have you actually talked to a user about this?â They give you what you ask for, not necessarily what you need to hear. An interesting observation and iâm keen to explore this more.
One of the highlight for me was connecting with Sam Larsen-Disney. We nerded out over startups, AI raises, the JSON vs TOON debate, and why theyâre building a better CRM at clarify.ai. Those spontaneous conversations at hackathons? Pure gold.
Back to my observation at the Hackathon, the new generation is building differently. Faster maybe, more AI-assisted? definitely. Iâm watching closely to see where this takes us. Whatâs your take - Are we optimizing for speed at the cost of user understanding, or is this just the evolution of how engineering gets done?