RIP software hackathons. Long live the hardware hackathon.

At a hackathon in Vilnius during the city's pink soup festival, run by the Basedcollective crew, one two-person team spent 48 hours with their fingers stuck inside an old rotary phone. The build was simple to describe and fiddly to pull off: a Raspberry Pi wired into the phone's internals, talking to every piece of its IO, the bell ringer, the hangup switch, the two-way audio, over a single websocket to a server.

The demo was the fun part. Pick up the receiver and you reach an AI agent voiced as a warm Yorkshire gentleman, courtesy of ElevenLabs. Ask it to "play some 70s Zambian psychedelic rock" or to assemble a playlist around artists allegedly named in the Epstein files, and it researches, builds, and plays the collection through the Spotify API. Niche requests in, curated music out, all through a piece of hardware designed decades before any of this existed.

The detail that actually matters

Here is the line worth sitting with: over the entire weekend, neither team member looked at a single line of code. A year ago that would have been an absurd claim at a competitive build event. Now it is just how the work gets done. For a hackathon, where the only acceptance criterion is that the thing works on stage, the contents of the source file stopped being the point.

That changes what a team spends its 48 hours on. The old hackathon was typing under fluorescent lights, aching fingers, zero sleep, fighting your own bugs. The new one is systems thinking. When a radical refactor costs you a prompt instead of a night, you stop guarding your architecture and start treating implementation as something cheap and disposable. The mental budget that used to go into syntax now goes into the harder question of how a thing meets the physical world.

Why hardware is where the bar moves next

There is a quiet problem buried in all this productivity. As software gets closer to solved, the software project itself gets less impressive. A web app that would have drawn applause two years ago now lands as mediocre, because everyone in the room knows it took an afternoon. The moonshot has to move somewhere the friction still lives.

Hardware is that somewhere. Physical interfaces still demand domain knowledge that does not collapse into a prompt: voltage, timing, the specific way a rotary phone signals a hangup. The interesting frontier is a renaissance of old tech that used to require niche, time-consuming expertise to touch at all, now reachable because the software layer around it has gone nearly free.

The pitch list from the Vilnius weekend leans deliberately ridiculous: a Game Boy Advance reborn as a Bloomberg terminal, a fax machine turned into a social network, an LLM-driven cash register that can feel love and pain, a voice-activated microwave with opinions. None of these have a defensible business case, and that is rather the point. A hackathon is not a VC pitch deck. The honest version of the format is an overbuilt, morally confusing obelisk of wires and APIs, a frankenstein'd consumer device that makes you question your own reality.

What this signals for the next year

The broader read is that the value in building is migrating up and out, away from the keystrokes and toward the parts the models cannot do for you yet. For early-stage builders that is a useful tell about where genuine differentiation now sits. Anyone can ship the app. Far fewer people can make a 40-year-old phone hold a conversation and queue obscure Zambian rock without writing the glue by hand.

Expect more hackathons to lean into hardware in the coming months for exactly this reason. When the software layer becomes background, the demo that wins is the one with something physical and slightly unhinged sitting on the table, daring you to pick up the receiver.

The full writeup lives at blog.oscars.dev.