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AI Tinkerers will host a global hackathon for builders to develop working agents. Sponsors OpenAI, CopilotKit, and OpenRouter will provide support.
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AI Tinkerers DC Metro held a technical show-and-tell with live demos and system design discussions. Cursor and AWS sponsored the event.
AI Tinkerers DC hosted a code-first meetup with live demos and technical discussions on AI, sponsored by Softengi.
AI Tinkerers DC Metro hosted an in-person meetup for builders. The event featured technical demos and discussions, sponsored by the Syracuse Institute for Democracy, Journalism and Citizenship.
AI Tinkerers and Trilligent hosted an in-person meetup focused on AI.
Builders discussed managing hidden technical debt in generative artificial intelligence startups during an intimate, invite-only lunch, supported by Databricks.
AI Tinkerers and Google hosted a DC Metro meetup for AI professionals. The event featured live demos, technical discussions, and networking. Syracuse University sponsored the space.
![A man speaks at a podium to an audience in a well-lit room, with a large screen behind him displaying an article or presentation. The setting appears to be an indoor event or lecture.. Text: greg.org
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Stevens: a hackable AI assistant using a single SQLite table and a handful of cron jobs
There's a lot of hype these days around patterns for building with AI. Agents, memories, RAG, autonomous-on-many-homesteads but the reality is, you don't need fancy techniques or libraries to build useful personal tools with LLMs.
In this short post, I'll show you how I built a useful AI assistant for my family using a [unreadable] single architecture: a single SQLite table of memories, and a handful of cron jobs for ingesting memories and sending updates, all hosted on Vercel. The whole thing is so simple that you can easily copy and extend it yourself.
Meet Stevens
The assistant is called Stevens, named after the butler in the great [unreadable] novel [unreadable] of the Day. Every morning he sends a brief to me and my wife via Telegram, including our calendar schedules for the day, a preview of the weather forecast, any [unreadable] mail or packages we're expected to receive, and any reminders we've asked it to [unreadable] track of. All written up nice and formally, just like you'd expect from a proper butler.
Throughout this post, because our actual updates contain private [unreadable]
With Stevens on-demand, we can forward
Telegram](https://images.aitinkerers.org/cdn-cgi/image/height=475,width=700,fit=cover,format=auto,quality=68/blog_images/dc-image-main-jpg-yVY0.jpg)
Active LLM builders gathered for focused, hands-on time featuring five-minute work-in-progress demos and networking. JPMorgan and Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman sponsored the practitioner-only event.
Active LLM builders gathered for hands-on value, community demos, and insights from Google's local AI team. Structured sponsored the event.
Hands-on builders demoed and networked with foundation models and generative AI. The in-person gathering featured raw work-in-progress demos. Standd and Vertex Labs sponsored the event.
Practitioners connected for an in-person evening of raw work demos and technical exchange focused on foundation models and LLM apps, sponsored by Standd.IO, Structured, and Vertex Labs.
Best AI meetup in DC for builders
AI Tinkerers DC 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 DC chapter is part of a 253-city global network with 124,000+ 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 DC chapter.
A typical AI Tinkerers DC 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 Agents, Everywhere: Beyond The Chatbot — Global Hackathon on September 12, 2026. Subscribe to the DC chapter to get notified about future events.
AI Tinkerers DC is the best AI meetup in DC for hands-on builders who want live code demos, technical discussion, and no-pitch networking. The DC 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.
AI Tinkerers DC 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.
Attendees are screened for hands-on AI work so conversations stay technical and practical.
Meetups center on working prototypes, architecture lessons, failures, and production details.
The DC chapter is part of a 253-city network with 124,000+ members worldwide.
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.
AWS
AWS is the world's most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform, offering over 200 fully featured services from 33 geographic Regions.
AWS Lambda
AWS Lambda is the premier serverless, event-driven compute service: Run code in response to triggers without provisioning or managing any infrastructure.
AWS Step Functions
Orchestrate distributed applications and microservices using visual workflows (state machines); manage sequence, error handling, and parallel execution across 200+ AWS services.
ChromaDB is the open-source vector database built for LLM applications, providing simple, fast semantic search via embedding management.
Claude Sonnet 4.5 is Anthropic's premier model: state-of-the-art for agentic coding, computer use, and complex, long-horizon workflows.
Deploy serverless code instantly on Cloudflare's global network, executing with zero cold starts via V8 isolates for ultra-low latency.
E2B is the International Council for Harmonisation (ICH) standard for the electronic transmission of Individual Case Safety Reports (ICSRs) in pharmacovigilance.
ElevenLabs delivers emotionally rich, human-like AI voice synthesis: text-to-speech, professional voice cloning, and AI dubbing across 30+ languages.
FFmpeg is the leading, open-source multimedia framework: it decodes, encodes, transcribes, muxes, demuxes, streams, and filters almost any audio or video format.
"Allowing people to present who weren’t signed up was great. It felt open and inviting."
"Small group was great, people with diverse backgrounds from big to small companies, lots of honest and deep technical discussions."
"Love the emphasis on demos/things people are passionate about."
"Keep the diversity of projects in rotation. All were excellent and enjoyable. I learned a bunch."
"I loved the creativity of this one. I would have asked that he only showcase 1 or 2, but not 3 things."
"Keep putting on these events as it is great to have a shared space and events for like minded individuals all working on innovative things."
"Thanks a bunch for organizing. Amazing group of people."
"- Demos/presentations. I thought they were great. - name tags, time for socializing"
"I did end up liking the exclusivity. I would love to come with a demo for one of the next events!"
"Demos were great, I enjoyed the ones that were more side projects and general informational tips than work projects."
Last updated: August 2026
