Build Speed Is Cheap Now. Clarity Isn’t.

A year ago, hackathons were still a test of execution. Teams spent most of their time wiring things up, fighting tooling, and trying to get a demo working before the deadline.

Today, the most obvious shift is that the path from idea to demo has collapsed to hours.
At The Future of Agents hackathon, the most consistent signal wasn’t what people built, but how fast they built it.

That speed is real. But the more important story is what it reveals.

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Why Speed Collapsed

Two curves are moving in the same direction:

• Models are getting smarter month over month.
  They can do things they could not do a few weeks ago.
• The cost of building keeps dropping.
  It is cheaper to try, cheaper to iterate, cheaper to ship a v0.

Moustafa Elhadary (Applied AI, OpenAI) summarized it in one line: models can do things they couldn’t do last month, and building with them is getting much cheaper. So why not just keep building?

This is not hype. It is an economic and capability shift. When the marginal cost of experimentation falls, building becomes the default behavior.

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Why Speed Stopped Being the Advantage

Once everyone can move fast, speed stops being a differentiator.
It becomes table stakes.

Hackathons are a compressed environment, which makes this visible immediately. When building is cheap, shipping something is no longer impressive by itself. What matters is whether the output holds together as a product.

That is the real signal hackathons surface now: the bottleneck moved up the stack.

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The New Bottlenecks

When build speed is abundant, the scarce inputs change. The teams that stand out tend to be strong in three areas:

Clarity of Intent

Can you describe what “good” looks like? Can you define the user, the workflow, and the outcome with precision? If you cannot, agents will generate output, but it will not converge into something coherent.

Domain Understanding

Do you actually understand the workflow, constraints, and edge cases of the user you claim to serve? Faster building amplifies bad assumptions. Domain grounding prevents surface-level solutions.

Taste

Taste is not aesthetics. It is judgment. It is knowing what to cut, what to keep, and what to ignore. When you can build anything, the winning move is deciding what not to build.

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What This Looks Like in Practice

You can usually see two categories of projects:

Surface-Level Demos

They look impressive at first glance. They have a lot of surface area. But the product is fuzzy. The workflow is unclear. The “why” does not survive basic questions.

Product-Like v0s

They are smaller. They are tighter. They make one workflow feel inevitable. Even if they were built in five hours, they feel like a real product because the intent is clear and the scope is disciplined.

Judges and sponsors can tell the difference almost immediately. Not because of polish, but because coherence is obvious when you see it.

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What This Changes for Builders and Teams

If speed is table stakes, the way strong teams operate starts to change:

Team Composition Matters More Than Raw Engineering Count

The best teams are not necessarily the ones with the most engineers. Domain experts, designers, and product thinkers create clarity faster, and clarity is now the limiting factor.

The Developer Role Shifts Toward Specification and Judgment

Implementation is less of the constraint. The ability to articulate intent, define constraints, and evaluate outputs becomes more valuable.

Design and Product Judgment Gain Leverage

When agents can execute, the people who can describe what good looks like and cut decisively become the force multipliers.

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The Takeaway

Speed is the entry ticket.
It is not the win condition.