AI Tinkerers San Diego: May Builders’ Meetup

AI Tinkerers San Diego is back for another evening of code-first demos, messy experiments, and high-signal technical exchange. This is a curated gathering of engineers, researchers, and technical founders who are actively shipping with foundation models — no slide decks, no sales pitches, no “thought leadership.” Just builders walking through real systems, the trade-offs behind them, and the parts that broke on the way there.

We want to see the internals: your architecture, your prompts, your orchestration logic, your evals, your failure modes. If it’s working, show us how. If it’s half-broken but interesting, show us that too.

What to Expect

• Community Demos: 5-7-minute, code-first presentations. Live systems preferred over recorded ones.
• Technical Q&A: Deep-dive discussion after each demo — implementation notes, trade-offs, what you’d do differently.
• Builder Networking: Dedicated time to trade patterns, debugging tricks, and war stories with peers facing the same constraints.

Topics We’re Especially Interested In

We welcome any technical demo from an active builder, but this month we’re particularly excited to see work in these areas:

• Software Factories & AI-native dev workflows — pipelines of agents that plan, architect, code, review, and deploy; spec-driven development; self-evolving codebases; automated PR review and guardrails.
• Agentic orchestration & reliability in production — multi-step reasoning, tool-calling reliability, recovery from failure modes, and what it takes to move an agent from demo to deployed.
• Evals & observability for agentic systems — how you actually know your agent works: traces, regression tests, scoring rubrics, and what “good” looks like for non-deterministic systems.
• Local-first & efficient inference — on-device and on-prem deployment, quantization tricks, MLX, sub-4B models, and squeezing real performance out of small footprints.
• Context engineering & memory — RAG architectures, knowledge-graph grounding, persistent state, memory consolidation, and long-running agent context management.
• Applied AI for business functions — GTM engineering, LLM-powered sales/support/ops agents, automated content and workflow pipelines that actually ship revenue.

Working on something that doesn’t fit neatly into the list? Submit anyway — if it’s technically interesting, it belongs in the room.

Submit Your Demo

• Live code preferred — show the stack, the prompts, the failure modes
• Depth over polish — rough experiments welcome if they demonstrate a unique approach
• No pitches — this is a builder-to-builder forum, not a sales channel

Who Should Attend

This event is for active builders, researchers, and technical founders building with foundation models. Registration is screened based on demonstrable technical work (GitHub, LinkedIn, or a technical portfolio) to keep the room high-signal and the conversations deep.

Not a good fit if you’re looking to enter the field, sell a product, or pitch a service — we’ll politely redirect.

Sponsors & Host

AI Tinkerers San Diego is 100% volunteer-run. Huge thanks to our sponsors for making this possible!

Able is the AI agent for the construction suppliers that eliminates repetitive job quote tasks so you can focus on what matters.

Clinically AI is the intelligence platform for behavioral health, offering AI-powered solutions that help clinicians reclaim their day. Their flagship product, Clinical Notes AI, generates accurate, individualized clinical documentation in seconds-reducing documentation time by 60-80% while maintaining compliance with payer requirements and quality standards. Purpose-built for behavioral health workflows, the platform is EHR-agnostic, HIPAA-compliant, SOC 2 certified, and serves thousands of clinicians nationwide, from solo practitioners to multi-state enterprise networks.

Structured - Structured, a premier IT solutions provider, proudly sponsors the AI Tinkerers meetup. For over 30 years, they have excelled in bridging digital divides through secure, cloud-connected infrastructure and tailored IT strategies. Their unique blend of security expertise, cloud fluency, and digital infrastructure know-how positions them at the forefront of technological innovation. By supporting this meetup, they aim to foster the same spirit of creativity and problem-solving that drives their award-winning solutions, exploring AI’s potential in transforming businesses and tackling real-world challenges.

Interested in hosting or sponsoring a future event? Reach out to the organizers.