On a breezy San Francisco afternoon last Saturday, I found myself at a nondescript coworking space filled with shoeless coders.

Just over a hundred visitors had crowded into an office building in the Duboce Triangle neighborhood for a showdown that would pit teams armed with AI coding tools against those made up of only humans (all were asked to ditch their shoes at the door). The hackathon was dubbed “ Man vs. Machine ,” and its goal was to test whether AI really does help people code faster—and better.

Roughly 37 groups were randomly assigned “human” or “AI-supported.” Later, an organizer told me several people dropped out after being placed on the human team. A panel of judges would rank projects based on four criteria: creativity, how useful it might be in the real world, techni

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