This week I was part of the supporting team at a TRATON GenAI Hackathon.
Two days exploring the usual suspects, Claude, Codex, Kiro, and others, with two goals in mind: produce something we could transport to our day-to-day jobs, and upskill teammates who are only now dropping in, without ever having properly surfed the hype.
Teams from Sweden, Germany, Portugal, and Brazil came together to freely explore internal systems and unleash their creativity.
For someone who has already done a few of these, the amazing part is the speed at which we can now produce high-fidelity PoCs, with real use cases, in just two 9-to-5 days. And those days were still sprinkled with group sessions, context switching, and the usual interruptions.
Last year, in a different setting and context, we pushed the 3-day schedule to the normal extremes these events tend to require. All-nighter, or close to it. Technologies we did not master, or had never properly tried. Tools that were still in the alpha or beta stage. Even then, we already had GenAI-assisted development flows, and I do not think we could have produced an end-to-end case in time without modern development tooling.
At our GenAI Hackathon, some teams produced end-to-end solutions in less than 8 working hours.
This was probably the most relaxed hackathon I have ever been involved in. If you do not see what this means for R&D and Innovation work, you are probably not looking closely enough.
Many will look at this and think: “This should be pretty standard by now. You are late to the game.” Maybe.
But I think many of us are living in a bubble. There is still a huge crowd outside the loop, just feeling the water temperature. Many are still using these tools without direction and without intent. Others are still too shy to jump in. And that is why promoting these internal events is so important. You’ll easily unlock your company structure ideas, level up your in-house GenAI proficiency, and disseminate knowledge and practices from your experts that you didn’t even know you had.
P.S. Special props to our Innovation & Engineering Hub teams, especially my Watchdog teammates, for taking home 3 out of 5 wins.
#GenAI #Hackathon #Innovation #AIToolsForDevelopers #Upskilling