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                    "Students had one Friday evening, 18 GB of coding-agent transcripts, and a single question: where are we burning tokens? They investigated wasted tokens, agents stuck in loops, and whether swearing at AI changes its behavior. This was Quesma\u2019s first token economics hackathon.\n\nMy peak hackathon years: 2011-2012\nBack then, building an application overnight required pragmatic choices and skills. You needed a manageable idea, a team working well together, and tools that let you move quickly. Meteor, PubNub, or Twilio were our secret weapons.\nAt pre-IPO Facebook in the summer of 2011, hackathons for interns were every Thursday. Zuckerberg encouraged the hacker ethos: move fast and break things. The ability to test many buggy versions was a competitive advantage against Google\u2019s social product. Students with a few weeks of industry experience shipped the edit-post feature. I built an internal screenshot tool for reporting bugs.\nIn 2012, Greylock Hackfest at Dropbox\u2019s office was a ticket to meet prospective investors. The Ivy League teams were strong competition, and the demos had a wow factor.\nToday, vibe coding makes demos cheap and easy, so a demo alone is not enough. The format needs to evolve.\nHackathons helped you learn, show your talent, and meet employers, investors, or future co-founders. I have fond memories of that era. Then startups took over my calendar.\nWho comes to hackathons in 2026?\nMost participants were students around 20, still figuring out what they wanted to do. AI was complicating those choices.\nOne participant told me they had turned down a place at a prestigious, expensive UK university. Was it worth the investment in the AI era?\nCompared with my generation in Poland, the young people I meet seem more entrepreneurial, resourceful, and internationally minded. They trust each other more. My generation had it easier in one respect: we had conviction. I believed the internet would keep growing. After the iPhone launched, smartphones were an obvious bet. So was cloud computing.\nAI keeps surprising everybody. I get the doubts, but you need to believe and bet on something. We have a responsibility to help students find that direction.\nThe event: Masters of Token Economics\nOur investor, Inovo, and Startup Founders Stars organize the Vibe Coding Summer Jam series, where companies bring real business problems for participants to solve. Quesma hosted Session #5.\nWe ran from 5 pm until past midnight. Friday evening worked well for everyone\u2019s schedules. I opened with a presentation about Quesma and the challenge. Then participants formed five teams, each with its own room.\nThey worked on their own laptops, with up to $100 in OpenRouter credits from Quesma. I helped teams explore different directions. Inovo partner Tomasz Swieboda was also available throughout the evening and brought two teenagers as observers. We provided pizza and non-alcoholic drinks.\nOur business case: find insights in SWE-chat\nAt Quesma, we analyze coding-agent trajectories to improve token efficiency. Many companies are hitting their token budgets in 2026.\nFor the hackathon, we presented SWE-chat, originally gathered at Stanford from open-source contributors with research papers behind it. These are records of coding sessions involving tools such as Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, and Pi. We asked participants to download the data and fish for opportunities.\nAn insight, a visualization, a token-saving technique: we wanted original ideas.\nWhat the five teams found\n\u201cHackengersi\u201d asked whether chaotic prompts, written as though someone were drunk, affected results. Their findings were inconclusive. My takeaway: AI is good at interpreting messy language. Ideas and requirements may matter more than proper sentences.\n\u201cPalantir\u201d investigated swearing, threats, and other forceful corrections. They found that expressive language helps and that being rude when prompting agents is effective. It reminded me of Sergey Brin\u2019s claim that models \u201ctend to do better if you threaten them.\u201d\n\u201cZesp\u00f3\u0142 1\u201d had my favorite visual presentation. They examined agents rereading files after compaction and repeatedly checking whether a background job had finished. They suggested there might be an alternative to compaction that avoids some rereads. Another improvement is to write a script once to poll a background job without keeping the LLM in the loop.\nAfter compaction, the model reads the same files again.59%of reads after compaction revisit files already read in that session.Sessions with compactionCodex25.9%Claude Code10.3%English adaptation of slide 5 by \u201cZesp\u00f3\u0142 1\u201d: Micha\u0142 Sarza\u0142a, Piotr Zapolski, and Tomasz \u015awi\u0119cki. Source and analysis.\n\u201cZENTRA\u201d tackled agents stuck in loops: rerunning tests without changing the code. Their Progress Guard demo showed how a monitor could detect this, nudge the agent, or stop the loop. It reminded me of Jarred Sumner at Anthropic, who mostly prompted Claude with encouragement such as \u201ckeep going\u201d and \u201cbelieve in yourself\u201d during his Riemann-hypothesis run.\n\u201cEkipa\u201d won the vote by a small margin. Their dashboard explored context size, compaction, and how long agents worked between user messages. They questioned whether waiting until roughly 170,000 tokens to compact was too late and suggested shorter stretches of independent work. They found historical patterns that backed up developers\u2019 intuitions, though the limits have changed in the latest models.\nThe winners, team \u201cEkipa\u201d: Pawe\u0142 Juzek, Natalia So\u0142oducha, and Maja Kowalska.\nWhat we learned and what comes next\nThe tooling was uneven. Some had Claude Code or Codex ready; one struggled with copy-pasting from Gemini Flash. A $100 to $200 monthly subscription is a barrier for some students.\nNext time, I\u2019d offer a short, optional workshop during the event: setting up tools and writing a program to analyze the data with OpenRouter and a cheaper model such as DeepSeek. Many teams analyzed only a subset. One reported spending about $40 on its analysis.\nI enjoyed the evening, and participants told me they did too. Companies that cut junior hiring risk missing out on their energy and ideas. I believe these students can help us adopt AI and cut token costs.\nQuesma is also sponsoring Warsaw Model Trainers. Our founding engineer Piotr Migda\u0142 is co-leading a model-training workshop with Ania Olchowik, ahead of the September 25-27 hackathon.\nWe\u2019re exploring a token economics hackathon in San Francisco in the second half of October 2026.\nThank you to Kewin Czupry\u0144ski, Bartosz Podg\u00f3rski, Tomasz \u015awieboda, and Malgorzata Piotrowska for organizing the event."
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