Advanced AI Engineering Camp with 🦄 ai that works

Join AI Tinkerers for a full-day immersive learning experience focused on building reliable, high performance ai agents according to the 12-factor agents methodology. Vaibhav and Dexter are AI experts (both YC founders backed by some of the best, building AI infrastructure, and strong contributors to the AI Tinkers West Coast community). They are bringing one of their most popular sessions to SF:

A full immersive day to learn how to build agents that work with today’s models, pushing them to the limit. We’ll follow the principles of 12-factor agents and learn how to push performance, reliability, and end-to-end experience of LLMs to the max using advanced prompt engineering techniques

You can see some of their podcasts here

Some takeaways from the previous sessions: Advanced Prompt Engineering Dec 2024

Be sure to bring your laptop, a charger, and your best agent ideas.

Previous sessions have had over 350 registrations, so please sign up early and only attend if you are an engineer. The content moves fast, and there’s a lot to cover.

When: Saturday, May 17, 2025

Time: 10:30 AM - 6:00 PM (Doors open at 9:00 AM, optional setup and tech check begins at 9:30AM)

Where: (Exact address TBD)

☝️ Register Above ☝️

What to Expect

The 🦄 AI That Works Live will be a full-day immersive learning experience focused on advanced prompt engineering techniques and practical application.

For the morning session, we’ll be working with typescript. For the afternoon challenge problems + hackathon, you can use any language you like - we’ll have starter repos for both python and typescript.

• 9:30 AM - 10:30 AM: Getting Started / Morning Coffee
  • Come clone the repo, get keys and model credits set up, and hang with YC founders!
  • Pre-requisites and setup list will be sent out one week prior to the event
• 10:30 AM - 12:00 PM: MORNING SESSION
  • Interactive instruction led by Vaibhav and Dex
  • Live code-along format where participants follow along on their devices
  • We’ll build a 12-factor agent from nothing to fully working
• 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM: LUNCH BREAK
  • Catered lunch
  • Panel of 3 YC companies and how they used AI to get $500k+ in ARR
• 1:00 PM - 2:30 PM: AFTERNOON SESSION
  • Interactive instruction led by Vaibhav and Dex continued
  • The second half will focus on more advanced prompting techniques
• 2:30 PM - 3 PM: BREAK
• 3 PM - 6 PM: Hackathon
  • Take everything you’ve learned and build your starter project into something amazing
  • We’ll have a starter project for you to bootstrap from, and then you’ll be able to add some advanced capabilities to it. No crud code, only practice the advanced parts to lock in what you’ve learned.

Who Should Attend?

This workshop is designed for active AI builders, engineers, and entrepreneurs. If you’re actively tinkering with LLMs and generative AI and agents and want to take your skills to the next level, this is the perfect event for you.

Our gatherings are not suitable for those looking to enter the field, individuals seeking to market their services like SaaS sales, consulting or recruiting, angel investors aiming to connect with prospective founders, or professionals looking for early stage clients, etc.

Specifically, this event is perfect for:

• Professional developers and engineers
• AI practitioners
• Technical leaders
• Emphasis on working professionals (not students)

What Will You Learn?

At the AI Engineering Camp, you’ll discover advanced prompt engineering techniques and gain practical coding experience. You’ll learn from expert facilitators and guest speakers from successful AI startups (YC alumni) and apply your knowledge to real-world challenges.

🍕 Sponsors

🦄 ai that works

AI That Works is a weekly deep dive on practical engineering techniques to get the most out of todays models. Past topics have included large-scale classification, building coding agents, pragmatic and minimalist evals, and getting started with 12-factor agents.

Baseten

We’re excited to have Baseten as our venue and inference sponsor! Baseten is the fastest way to build AI-powered applications. Their serverless platform handles all the infrastructure complexity, allowing developers to focus on building with their favorite ML models. With Baseten, you can:

• Deploy ML models with a single click
• Build full-stack AI applications without managing infrastructure
• Scale automatically to handle any workload
• Access a growing library of pre-trained models

During the workshop, participants will get free inference credits to experiment with various models on Baseten’s platform. Experience firsthand why leading AI teams trust Baseten for their production ML deployments.

Learn more at baseten.co

We’re proud to partner with OSS4AI, a community-driven initiative promoting open source development in artificial intelligence. OSS4AI connects developers, researchers, and enthusiasts who believe in making AI technology accessible and transparent through open source collaboration.