Standing at a table in the frigid air after TreeHacks, the only question I remember was: 

“Did you incorporate AI?”

My first thought:  I need some buzzwords that meet the expectations of this particular passerby, who may or may not be a judge. Luckily, my teammate stepped in and said something like:

“No, there’s no AI. We had a specific use case, and adding a chatbot wouldn’t have made the user experience better.”

Of course, there is more to artificial intelligence than chatbots and LLM wrappers. I love AI, I love LLMs and I love cool LLM wrappers — after all, I’m a Stanford CS major. But my teammate was right, and it got me thinking (a difficult task, after sifting through rock data and decades-old API documentation for thirty six hours straight) about what Treehacks implies in a broader context.

For some background, my team built an easy-to-use website for predicting atmospheric CO2 removals and ended up winning the first Sustainability Track, on best addressing user pain points. I am so grateful to my team and our incredible mentorship from Professor Kate Maher in making this project a reality. But the lingering question I had was, why is ‘addressing pain points’ a separate category at all? Why aren’t all projects judged on addressing societal pain points? Shouldn’t the goal of all technology be making the world a better, or generally less ‘painful’, place? Instead, TreeHacks pushes us to use newfangled technologies for the sake of ‘wow’ factor, even where they aren’t needed.

The weekend of the hackathon, I saw some of the most impressive projects I’ve ever seen, built by some of the smartest people I’ve ever met, all in a single building over thirty-six continuous hours. Given that most of the TreeHacks tracks this year were based around the current buzzword technologies, a large portion of projects I saw were centered on Web3, AI agents and as always, military technology. Some stellar health and sustainability projects won awards in categories outside of their smaller issue-centric tracks, but the incentives present logically pushed most teams toward projects built for buzzword optimization and technical ‘cool factor’ over problem-solving. After all, most hackathons are designed as a competitive display of skills and a fun excuse to build cool things we wouldn’t otherwise pursue.

While every project I witnessed was incredibly technically impressive, many projects were built to increase day-to-day conveniences, rather than meaningfully improve the world. In line with typical hackathons, TreeHacks accomplished what it set out to do. But, I couldn’t shake the feeling that we participants, as a collective, had just demonstrated a far greater potential for improving the world: a potential that deserves to be harnessed.

I came into Stanford with the intention of studying computer science to build highly-scalable climate solutions even if I admittedly didn’t know what this could look like at first, and even though I’m still trying to find my way. I would feel comfortable making the assumption that most Stanford students have something they would like to see changed in the world and seek to be a meaningful part of that change. Stanford is the beating heart of Silicon Valley, and thus a bastion of technological progress for the entire world. TreeHacks is many Stanford hackers’ first exposure to building a real technical project from start to finish. Thus, setting a precedent at TreeHacks for technology to be used to address needs over wants has the potential to be wildly influential in shaping the trajectories of future techies, researchers and executives alike.

Contrary to most hackathon critics, I would argue that optimizing for resume value and meaty multi-thousand-dollar prizes is a fully justifiable objective going into hackathons. I dream every night of the same rewards — maybe next year, Jensen Huang will come sign my GPU. What’s better than a fun competition with real-world stakes?

Participants get cool prizes, the event gets funding and sponsors get exposure. But when companies alone get to dictate the hackathon’s imperative, impressive optimization and performative spectacle begin to drown out the potential for real social impact, due to companies seeking maximum product exposure incentivized by prizes for coolest or most extensive use of so-and-so product.

I wonder what could be built in 36 hours by 350 of the world’s brightest collegiate teams judged on the basis of how many lives their hack could save in five years or the total number of greenhouse gas emissions their technology could reduce over the coming decade. What happens if you get 1000 hackers competing to save the Amazon Rainforest, and make ‘Tree’-Hacks live up to its name? Certainly, an impact-centered TreeHacks would result in at minimum a handful of ideas that could grow into meaningful real-world solutions, not to mention encouraging global intellectual capital to maximize impact in future endeavors.

Participants would get to shake hands with the same sponsors and the prizes would stay the same: the only change being a track titled “Coolest Use of Blockchain” having been slightly amended to “Most Impactful Use of Blockchain.” Such a small shift in tone could provide a necessary nudge for teams to build equally trendy and complex projects that are oriented at solving real-world problems. By changing the competition’s incentive structure ever so slightly, everyone still wins — companies get good optics, tracks are still aligned to sponsors’ respective sectors and the world gets 350 unique solutions in a 36-hour Manhattan Project for climate, health or another global need.

Palantir’s Alex Karp and Nicholas Zamiska recently called out Silicon Valley for fixating on trivial inconveniences over real-world problems. While I don’t agree that the technological progress of the U.S. military is the real-world imperative to replace the convenience market with, it feels apparent that in chasing where the money flows. Tech culture across the Bay has begun to focus on solutions to convenience more than global needs. Stanford’s influence on Silicon Valley is undeniable. The metrics we set for technological progress on campus through events like TreeHacks will have global consequences as graduating students enter the labor force.

Stanford’s vision statement establishes its founding purpose as “establishing the welfare of people everywhere.” Next year, through an altogether minor shift in incentives, I hope TreeHacks will pursue the same goal.

Maanit Goel ’28