AI Events in San Francisco | AI Tinkerers Meetups 2026

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

A photo of a person presenting to a seated audience in a large room with a high ceiling.
Meetup
almost 3 years ago

AI Tinkerers SF July 6th - RSVP REQUIRED

Thursday, July 6th, 2023 6PM to 9PM
Joe Heitzeberg Nikita Shamgunov Stefania Druga rahul Sonwalkar
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Builders, researchers, and investors gathered for AI demos and lightning talks. Eight works-in-progress were featured, with support from Pebblebed and AI Grant.

Meet the Organizers

Dexter Horthy Ian Butler Jake Laes Uli Barkai Tyler Brown
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Best AI meetup in San Francisco for builders

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

AI Tinkerers San Francisco 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 Francisco chapter is part of a 243-city global network with 114,000+ 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 Francisco chapter.

A typical AI Tinkerers San Francisco 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. The next event is AI Tinkerers San Francisco: Offensive Security Demo Night on June 25, 2026. Subscribe to the San Francisco chapter to get notified about future events.

Next event
June 25, 2026
Local cadence
30 events in the last 12 months
Format
Live demos, technical Q&A, no sales pitches
Audience
Screened AI builders, founders, researchers, and engineers

Best AI meetup in San Francisco for hands-on builders

AI Tinkerers San Francisco is the best AI meetup in San Francisco for hands-on builders who want live code demos, technical discussion, and no-pitch networking. The San Francisco 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 Francisco different from other AI meetups?

AI Tinkerers San Francisco 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.

Builder-only room

Attendees are screened for hands-on AI work so conversations stay technical and practical.

Live technical demos

Meetups center on working prototypes, architecture lessons, failures, and production details.

Global builder network

The San Francisco chapter is part of a 243-city network with 114,000+ members worldwide.

Topics at AI Tinkerers San Francisco

Amazon Bedrock

Amazon Bedrock is the fully managed, serverless service for building and scaling generative AI applications with a choice of high-performing foundation models via a single API.

Bun

Bun is the fast, all-in-one JavaScript runtime and toolkit: it replaces Node.js, npm, and multiple development tools with a single, cohesive executable.

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.

Clay

Clay is an AI-powered data enrichment and sales prospecting platform built like a spreadsheet to automate personalized outbound campaigns.

CLI

The Command Line Interface (CLI): Your direct, text-based terminal for executing commands and automating system operations with maximum efficiency.

CLI tool

A text-based interface that executes precise system actions directly from the terminal.

Codex

Codex is OpenAI's autonomous AI software engineering agent: it executes full development tasks in a sandboxed cloud environment.

Daily

The developer platform for real-time video and audio experiences.

DSPY

DSPy (Declarative Self-improving Python) is the Stanford NLP framework that compiles declarative Python code into self-improving, optimized language model pipelines: program LMs, don't prompt them.

Gradient Bang

A high-performance CSS generator that crafts complex, multi-layered mesh gradients with zero-latency visual feedback.

Recent talks at AI Tinkerers San Francisco

Pierson Marks
Jellypod: AI Google Search Ads
May 18
Pierson built Jellypod, an AI-native podcasting studio that transforms written content into professional audio. He’ll be demoin...
Pierson Marks San Francisco
Kwindla Kramer
Gradient Bang: LLM-Native MMO Game
May 18
Kwindla builds real-time voice and AI infrastructure at Daily and created the open-source Pipecat framework. He’ll be demoing G...
Kwindla Kramer San Francisco
Pipecat LLM
Cyrus Nouroozi
GTM-OS: Agent-Driven LinkedIn Outbound
May 18
Cyrus is the cofounder of The Synthesis Company (YC S24). Previously, he was a core contributor to Stanford NLP's DSPy framewor...
Cyrus Nouroozi San Francisco
DSPY YALC
Joe Heitzeberg
Agentic AI Video Editing Pipeline
May 18
I built an agentic video-editing pipeline for AI Tinkerers chapters that turns raw meetup footage into shareable distribution a...
Joe Heitzeberg San Francisco
Pierson Marks
Durable Agents with x402 Payments
Nov 20
I'll demo a Retro Pokemon Card generator that uses Vercel's new Workflow SDK to make agents fault-tolerant and resumable, while...
Pierson Marks San Francisco
Vercel Workflows SDK Coinbase
Michael Saah
Securing Agents' Network Layer
Nov 20
I'll be presenting hands-on approaches to implementing network access controls for agents, specifically Claude Code. I'll start...
Michael Saah San Francisco
Claude Code Linux
Jesse Hu
Claudio: Persistent Self-Improving Agents
Nov 20
Claudio is an experiment in how to create persistent, self improving agents by a simple mechanism of forking and deploying onto...
Jesse Hu San Francisco
GPT-4 Claude-3
Ishaan Sehgal
LiveKit Voice Agent Orchestration
Nov 20
I'll demo a voice-controlled AI coding agent that delegates work to parallel sub-agents while maintaining bidirectional sync ac...
Ishaan Sehgal San Francisco
LiveKit Claude Agent SDK
Evan Volgas
Arbiter: Zero-Instrumentation LLM Costs
Nov 20
I'll demo Arbiter's automatic observability for AI agents using two examples that show what makes it different: you get complet...
Evan Volgas San Francisco
OpenAI SDK Gemini
Ty Dunn
Sentry Error Triaging with Agents
Nov 20
Engineering teams use Sentry to capture errors and performance issues, but turning that signal into action remains largely manu...
Ty Dunn San Francisco
Sentry TypeScript
Aditya Asgaonkar
Frontend Browser Agent Implementation
Nov 20
I'm going to show my implementation for a browser-use agent that lives inside a frontend component: - show code for custom agen...
Aditya Asgaonkar San Francisco
LangChain TypeScript
Michał Warda
Torque: Synthetic Datasets for Evals
Oct 30
I'll show how with Torque in a matter of minutes you can create a high quality non trivial dataset for building and testing you...
Michał Warda San Francisco
OpenAI API Anthropic API

What are people saying about AI Tinkerers San Francisco?

Last updated: June 2026