Agentic coding has made engineering a lonely craft, hackathons are the answer!

During the stone age before AI came along, I still used to have long focus hours where I would go deep on a tough problem or a big rock and chisel through it. But, there used to be times where I would jump into pairing sessions with colleagues, usually smarter than me, and have fun solving tough problems together.

With AI, that doesn't happen anymore. Everyone has their own pairing buddy with unlimited knowledge (limited tokens though). Pair programming, and peer code-reviews are becoming a thing of the past.

The answer is hackathons! You don't code together anymore. You talk about business ideas and customer pains with your team. Everyone and their robot buddy picks up a stream/problem and gets hacking. We meet every day or even multiple times a day, get feedback, show off progress, and generally be excited about our collective brutal progress. At the end of 2 weeks, you have a magical chunk of work, done by distinct humans and robots, but comes together like a nice Lego set.