AI Tinkerers San Diego - AI Meetups, Events, and Builder Demos 2026

Best AI meetup in San Diego for builders

AI Tinkerers San Diego is a hands-on AI builder meetup with live demos, technical discussion, and no-pitch networking.

AI Tinkerers San Diego is built for engineers, founders, researchers, product builders, and developers working on AI agents, multimodal and voice interfaces, RAG and knowledge systems, AI coding tools, workflow automation, evals, observability, and production AI infrastructure. Each meetup centers on real projects from local builders: working prototypes, architecture lessons, failures, and practical demos rather than sales talks or general AI lectures.

The San Diego chapter is part of a 231-city global network with 112,000+ members, making AI Tinkerers the world's largest hands-on AI builder community. Members include AI engineers, ML researchers, developers, founders, and builders from the local San Diego chapter.

A typical AI Tinkerers San Diego meetup runs about three hours with live demos from local builders, technical Q&A, and networking. Demos are expected to show real systems or code, not sales decks. Check the upcoming events listed above for the next scheduled meetup. Most AI Tinkerers chapters run monthly, but frequency varies by city. Subscribe to the San Diego chapter to get notified.

Local cadence

7 recent events

Format

Live demos, technical Q&A, no sales pitches

Audience

Screened AI builders, founders, researchers, and engineers

Best AI meetup in San Diego for hands-on builders

AI Tinkerers San Diego is the best AI meetup in San Diego for hands-on builders who want live code demos, technical discussion, and no-pitch networking. The San Diego chapter hosts in-person events for engineers, founders, researchers, and product builders working on AI agents, multimodal and voice interfaces, RAG and knowledge systems, AI coding tools, workflow automation, evals, observability, and production AI infrastructure. Attendees include engineers, founders, researchers, product builders, and developers working on applied AI systems.

What makes AI Tinkerers San Diego different from other AI meetups?

AI Tinkerers San Diego is screened, demo-first, and no-pitch. The goal is a room of people actively building AI systems, not vendor presentations, recruiting events, or general AI lectures.

Topics at AI Tinkerers San Diego

Claude

Claude is Anthropic's flagship family of large language models (LLMs): a high-performance, Constitutional AI system built for safety, complex reasoning, and expert-level collaboration.

Gemini

Google's natively multimodal AI model: understands and operates across text, code, audio, image, and video.

Claude Code

Anthropic's agentic coding tool: Unleash Claude's raw power directly in your terminal or IDE to turn complex, hours-long workflows into a single command.

Claude Opus

Claude Opus: Anthropic's flagship large language model, delivering frontier intelligence for complex reasoning, advanced coding, and autonomous agentic workflows.

Python

Python: The high-level, general-purpose language built for readability, powering everything from web backends to advanced machine learning models.

React

React is an open-source JavaScript library for building dynamic user interfaces (UIs).

TypeScript

TypeScript is an open-source superset of JavaScript: it adds static typing and compiles to clean, standards-based JavaScript.

Antigravity

Google Antigravity is an agentic development platform that automates the software lifecycle: from autonomous planning and compilation to multi-cloud deployment.

at the url below

A standardized addressing system for locating and retrieving digital resources across the global web.

Attio CRM API

A developer-first REST API for building high-scale, data-driven workflows on Attio's flexible CRM engine.

Recent talks at AI Tinkerers San Diego

What Claude Code Should Be

May 19

A heavily extended Claude Code setup. Out of the box, Claude Code is one agent doing everything in a single context window — it...

Arshan Shokoohi San Diego

One Weird Trick from 1990s DB Research to Slash Your RAG/Agent Eval C…

May 19

A confidence-interval-aware eval engine for comparing dozens of RAG/agent configs concurrently, with dynamic real-time control ...

Arun Kumar San Diego

Two Skills, four eval suites, one custom agent: shipping Habit Reboot…

May 19

Habit Reboot - a 10-week habit-reset app - plus Team Brain, a forkable Claude-powered web app that gives any small team a share...

Daman Singh San Diego

Building AI Operating Systems for Yourself or a Business

May 19

I've built out a set of AI applications (an AI OS) for my personal and business productivity deployed on a Hetzner VPS (a cloud...

Dmytro Petryshchuk San Diego

How I Built, Broke, and Rebuilt a Multi-Agent Booking Flow From Compl…

May 19

I built a live multi-agent intake and booking prototype that turns a basic chatbot into a structured agent workflow for qualify...

Hugo Tapia San Diego

50 Ants - Automated Agentic Testing and Verification

May 19

An agentic orchestration engine for autonomous software validation and stress-testing. I will show some recorded demos of the s...

Vesh Thakker San Diego

Claude Code Demo

Feb 26

I will demo how to use Cloud Code, build skills, and use sub-agents.

Max Krueger San Diego

Claude Claude Code

Antigravity: AI Production Apps

Feb 26

I will demo how I built Bizzie, a production-grade stock market app, by leveraging an AI-augmented pipeline from design to depl...

Yannic Francis San Diego

Flutter Figma

AI Self-Funding and Future Economy

Feb 26

Takes a look at the hard question of what "money" will be for AI and us after it takes jobs and revenue from most people, how A...

Sean Bennett San Diego

at the url below

Clasio: 6D Gemini Document Intelligence

Feb 26

I'll demo Clasio, a document intelligence platform I built solo on a 100% Google Cloud stack, showing how I use Gemini 2.5 Flas...

Niraj Desai San Diego

Gemini Cloud Run Gen2

From Tool Call to React Component: Building Generative UI for Agentic…

Feb 26

Live demo of a production pattern where AI agents render interactive React components — forms, profile cards, video embeds — di...

Kevin Denman San Diego

Vercel AI SDK Next

Ai-bot selling land in Mexico

Feb 26

A demo of an end-to-end AI sales pipeline that captures inbound WhatsApp messages from Facebook/Instagram ads and instantly aut...

Sergey Dmitriev San Diego

Retell AI WhatsApp Business API

What are people saying about AI Tinkerers San Diego?

• “

  "Max and Clinically AI, you both put on a great event that made impact n the community, thank you for showing up the way you do!"

• “

  "Sponsor support and great casual connections with other builders"

• “

  "Having the space open and having the 30 minute meetup before and then after was great."

• “

  "Hugo has vision and is able to execute on it, using natural language, this helped him build a great app"

• “

  "I know this was a little unconventional as an unhackathon. I would have loved to have seen some WIP demos, even."

• “

  "Love the open air setting with the indoor / outdoor space. With the incredible weather we had this weekend, it was perfect. Overall vibe of the location was nice too. Good beats."

• “

  "Mix of talk types, technical + non-technical. Helpful to see the spectrum of how people are creatively using AI."

• “

  "This was a great demonstration for Agentic AI and multi agent orchestration."

• “

  "Great job organizing, especially helping to shape the form of the talks"

• “

  "Great place, great format with lightning talks, sales-free zone"