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Hackathons in the vibe coding era: our token economics experimentquesma.com

Students had one Friday evening, 18 GB of coding-agent transcripts, and a single question: where are we burning tokens? They found many wasteful patterns in agentic coding.

2 points•jakozaur•10 days ago•2 comments•
#coding#token#vibe#era#economics#hackathons#experiment#vibe coding

2 comments

Tina272710 days ago
did the teams that spent the most tokens actually ship more, or did spend mostly track how lost they got?
jakozaur10 days ago
I would say so. In this exercise, more tokens meant better results. Though DeepSeek tokens were as good as frontier ones.

In this hackathon, how much data you analyzed was correlated with tokens spent.

Analyzing the whole dataset gave the best insights, but cost more tokens. Using a small dataset could save tokens, but some insights were premature.

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