I just finished a 24-hour hackathon. Here is the breakdown:
prompting 20 hours
video editing 4 hours
coding 0 hours
We got stuck twice. The first time, someone ran out of Claude Code quota. They tried another coding agent, but it was not smart enough to pick up where Claude had stopped. The second time, someone's agent refused a git push. They couldn't merge the code in CLI.
This is at MIT, where a different generation of hackers were born.
Hackathons peak sometime after midnight. The coffee ran out. The codebase was near collapse. You stopped naming variables well. You patched one bug and heard another part of the program crack. At 4 AM, with half your brain asleep, you typed git push directly from master, something you would never approve in daylight.
You told yourself, fuck it, this is my last hackathon.
For a second, the cursor stays still. Then the lines begin to move. Objects counted. Objects compressed. The remote resolves its deltas. You wait for the prompt to return.
Enumerating objects: 25, done.
Counting objects: 100% (25/25), done.
Delta compression using up to 8 threads
Compressing objects: 100% (16/16), done.
Writing objects: 100% (6/6), 8979 bytes | 2.57 MiB/s, done.
Total 94 (delta 37), reused 14 (delta 3), pack-reused 0 (from 0)
remote: Resolving deltas: 100% (27/27), completed with 27 local objects.
To github.com:chuanqisun/hackathon.git
4344b56..96e8691 master -> master
git push used to carry feelings.
It is a small mixture of fear, control, and relief. Your change is leaving the machine in front of you and entering a shared history. You know enough about the system to imagine several ways this could go wrong. That knowledge gives the command its weight.
People around me increasingly ask agents to handle Git. This is reasonable. The hostile interface of git is the origin of many horrors and curses. An agent wraps the machine interface in a human conversation. You say what you want. It finds the command.
I do the same with ffmpeg. I ask an agent to extract audio, adjust sizes, extract audio, change a codec. I doubt many people will or should learn more than 1% of what ffmpeg can do.
But those people do exist. I watched someone operate ffmpeg from memory. They type a long command with filters, maps, codecs, frame rates, and flags arranged in an order I cannot read. The machine obeys precisely. The pianist found a chord without looking down.
This kind of fluency is easy to dismiss as the byproduct of poor design. Nobody becomes more human by memorizing flags. But I also know that the pleasure was real.
When you understand the mechanics of a complex system, you gain an intoxicating amount of control. The machine instantly does exactly what you asked, no refusal, no clarifying question, no token limit, no safety net. You are literally god to the machine.
At the hackathon, such power is no longer needed. We vibe coded the thing, made the video, submitted on time. When the agent stalled at git push, there was a moment of silence, as if an invitation to mourn the death of someone dear.
No, thanks. I took over the keyboard and finished the push.