AI Agents Waterloo: Voice AI Hackathon

Judged the Voice AI Hackathon yesterday, hosted by Ian Timotheos-Pilon and Ti Guo at Builders Club.

I’ve been in the ML/AI space for a while now, and I was still caught off guard by how far vibe coding has progressed. Some teams shipped things in a weekend that I know from experience would’ve been serious engineering efforts not long ago.

Ian said something during the event that stuck with me - “I’m not even sure the code matters as much anymore.” Watching teams ship polished products in under 2 days, it was hard to disagree. The marginal cost of producing good software has dropped fast. If shipping keeps getting easier, what actually differentiates? I keep coming back to the same things: user experience, reliability, and knowing which problem to solve in the first place.

One of the fellow judges and I were talking about how most hackathon projects never see the light of day again. That’s just the reality of it - and we genuinely hope some of these break through.

On the judging side, we ran an experiment. Built a system that reads codebases, watches demo videos with native audio understanding (Gemini Pro, not transcripts), and scores submissions against the rubric with written justifications before they reach the human judges. We ordered the output schema so the model has to write its reasoning before committing to a score - chain-of-thought enforced through schema design.

Integrity checks for prompt injection, demo-code mismatches, and whether something smells like it was built on top of someone else’s work rather than from scratch - all baked into the same structured output. Freed us up to focus on the shortlist instead of reviewing every submission manually. Demo here if you’re interested.

Sparked a lot of good conversations about the future of building. Some projects I really hope don’t stop here.