At a weekend hackathon in San Francisco, more than 100 programmers faced off to see if they could outcode AI tools. The "Man vs. Machine" event randomly split 37 teams into "human" and "AI-assisted" groups. Winners took home $12,500 in prize money plus API credits from OpenAI and Anthropic. The hackathon was co-organized by research group METR, which previously found that AI coding tools can slow down experienced developers by 19 percent. In the finals, both sides were evenly matched—three teams without AI and three teams using AI assistance. The winning project: a code review tool with heatmaps, built with AI support. Second place went to a writing tool for authors, developed without any AI.
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