Illustration only Photo by Dharaneeswaran R on Unsplash
HackEurope 2026 participant reports AI conformity dominated the event as front-end demos beat functional projects
Why it matters — This is a single participant's account carried by one feed, so the observations are uncorroborated. The critique highlights a tension engineers may recognize: events that once served as proxies for building ability now reward pitching and AI-assisted polish over functional depth.