Newsletter
Upcoming
AI Tinkerers will host a hackathon where builders will develop working agents for existing tools, with support from OpenAI, CopilotKit, and OpenRouter.
Past
AI Tinkerers NYC hosted an August Demo Day for LLM builders, featuring demos and networking, with support from sponsors Runpod and Veris AI.
The hackathon focused on live feeds and open data, featuring Google Cloud, Roboflow, and Veris.
AI Tinkerers hosted a "Run and Hack" event where participants could engage with Chat.dev and compete for custom Adizero Evo SL shoes.
AI Tinkerers NYC hosted a summer social on a rooftop, featuring an Oyster Demo Day that showcased two years of tinkering.
AI Tinkerers hosted a coworking cafe, fostering a focused environment for builders to tackle projects, share demos, and gain momentum.
AI Tinkerers hosted a closed-door dinner discussing AI cost at scale, with support from OpenRouter.
AI Tinkerers hosted a morning build sprint and coworking cafe. Participants tackled postponed projects in a focused environment with peers, concluding with optional demos.
The AI Tinkerers hosted a 5k run and hackathon, offering a $1,000 prize.
AI Tinkerers and ElevenLabs hosted an in-person hackathon focused on building the emotional layer for voice AI, encouraging practical demos and rewarding innovative solutions.
AI Tinkerers hosted an omakase dinner for founders and technical leads to discuss scaling agent-based products, with insights from Auth0 and MongoDB.
AI Tinkerers NYC hosted a demo day for practitioners building LLM applications. Sponsors PostHog, Convex, Veris AI, and HPE supported the event.
AI Tinkerers NYC and chat.dev hosted a unique hackathon and 5K run. Participants coded using chat.dev's AI platform during the run, with prizes awarded.
![A promotional banner for a tech event titled 'May Demo Day', featuring a surreal digital illustration of a classical bust integrated with a laptop.. Text: May Demo Day Focus: Adaptive Software ft. Sky Valley may 13 6pm–9pm AI TINKERERS VERIS [unreadable]](https://images.aitinkerers.org/cdn-cgi/image/height=475,width=700,fit=cover,format=auto,quality=68/blog_images/screenshot-2026-04-06-at-46-06-pm-png-iv2U.png)
AI Tinkerers showcased adaptive software, featuring live demos of self-healing and self-personalizing systems, with support from sponsor Veris AI.
AI Tinkerers hosted a two-day workshop for software engineers on building autonomous agentic workflows. Participants learned to create an open-source AI software factory.
AI Tinkerers hosted a co-working day for technical founders and AI builders to collaborate, share progress, and connect. A sponsor session was included.
AI Tinkerers hosted a hackathon with ElevenLabs, bringing together builders to create ethical and scalable generative media systems.
AI Tinkerers hosted a hackathon where builders created chaotic OpenClaw instances with questionable judgment. Submissions were judged on concept, execution, and demo impact.
AI Tinkerers and Kiro hosted an exclusive dinner for AI founders to discuss practical development challenges, sponsored by Kiro.
AI Tinkerers hosted a March meetup for technical practitioners building with foundation models, LLMs, and generative AI, showcasing demos and fostering builder connections, with support from Flowglad.
The hackathon explored AI agents in group chats, with builders using XMTP, Convos, and OpenClaw, supported by ElevenLabs and Convex.
AI Tinkerers hosted a dinner for founders and technical leaders to discuss practical challenges in shipping AI interfaces, fostering peer-level collaboration.
AI Tinkerers hosted an in-person hackathon focused on AI interfaces. Attendees collaborated to build innovative projects.
AI Tinkerers hosted a demo night featuring OpenClaw and Convex, showcasing new AI technologies.
The AI Tinkerers community gathered for a builders' night focused on codifying design intent from visuals into AI coding workflows, featuring a live technical demo from sponsor Baz.
Experienced builders developed cutting-edge Conversational Agents at the in-person hackathon, competing for significant prizes supported by MMP Boca and ElevenLabs.
Teams rapidly built AI prototypes during a 90-minute sprint, leveraging modern coding tools. Fifty builders participated, and all accepted registrants received free access to The AI Summit New York Expo.
Practitioners explored AI infrastructure reinvention with technical deep dives on GPU orchestration and distributed training, featuring Oracle and NVIDIA.
AI Tinkerers hosted an in-person November Demo Day featuring hands-on presentations and peer feedback for builders using LLMs, supported by Google Cloud.
Developers gathered for an in-person hackathon focused on building web-scale autonomous agents, prototyping across various tracks with support from Redis and CopilotKit.
Builders gathered for an in-person hackathon focused on autonomous finance agents, requiring projects to build on Raindrop. AI Tinkerers and LiquidMetal AI sponsored the event.
Twenty builders attended an intimate dinner discussing practical strategies for managing technical debt in production Generative Artificial Intelligence systems, with support from Databricks.
Practitioners gathered for a social demo night featuring live code demos, an identity security spotlight, and networking, supported by Auth0, Hex, and Redmond.
Builders attended an in-person hackathon focused on browser, voice, cloud, and image/video agents, competing for over $5k in total prizes sponsored by AI Tinkerers and others.
Practitioners showcased live work-in-progress demonstrations of Large Language Models and generative systems, receiving technical feedback, sponsored by Comet and Aikido Security.
Cloudflare’s “AI Avenue” is a 6-part YouTube series on AI across voice, vision, thinking, learning, doing, and the future. Join the NYC premiere this Tuesday, Oct 7, 6:30–9:30 PM at the ElevenLabs office to watch Episode 1 and a Thinking segment, get demos, Q&A, and network—RSVP: https://luma.com/feoo5mr1.
AI Tinkerers NYC and MongoDB hosted Demopalooza, a demo night for builders showcasing AI projects and fostering community innovation.
Teams prototyped local AI workflows using the Gemini Command Line Interface during the fast, hands-on buildathon, judged on technical merit and Gemini integration, supported by HH Global for Google.
Practitioners demonstrated live projects involving large language models and generative artificial intelligence, receiving feedback and networking with support from sponsors Auth0 and Comet.
AI Tinkerers hosted PromptLayer's CEO for a deep dive into creating a multi-agent email tool that achieved high open and reply rates while cutting costs.
Attendees built and deployed agentic applications on Google Cloud Run with serverless GPUs, utilizing various open models. Google, Penugonda, and Comet sponsored the hackathon.
The gathering featured a technical deep dive on building AI agents using Google Cloud AI tools, including community demos and insights from a Google Cloud Senior Customer Engineer, sponsored by HH Global for Google.
Coders and civic hackers built live, on-device computer vision demos using the Moondream model on public data, supported by M87 Labs.
AI builders gathered for a hands-on, technical show-and-tell, sharing working code and experiments over dim sum, sponsored by Deel and Apollo.
Startup founders gathered for a confidential, peer-sourced problem-solving brunch moderated by Diane Choi, resulting in actionable advice for specific business challenges, sponsored by Samsung Next.
AI Tinkerers hosted an in-person session detailing architectural patterns for planning-based AI systems featuring AI21 Labs' Maestro, with support from AI21 and AI21 Labs.
Engineers attended a full-day workshop focused on building reliable LLM agents using the 12-factor agents methodology, featuring instruction from YC founders and a panel of AI companies.
Ten AI founders and practitioners attended an intimate, invite-only dinner to trade candid operational insights on using AI tools, sponsored by AI Tinkerers and Samsung Next.
Attendees joined an intimate, invitation-only dinner for technical leaders to discuss deploying private enterprise artificial intelligence infrastructure with Kamiwaza.ai.
AI Tinkerers hosted an in-person evening featuring enterprise-grade agent demos and technical talks focused on LLM building, sponsored by Kamiwaza.
Best AI meetup in New York City for builders
AI Tinkerers New York City 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 New York City 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 New York City chapter.
A typical AI Tinkerers New York City 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 New York City chapter to get notified about future events.
AI Tinkerers New York City is the best AI meetup in New York City for hands-on builders who want live code demos, technical discussion, and no-pitch networking. The New York City 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 New York City 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 New York City chapter is part of a 253-city network with 124,000+ members worldwide.
TypeScript is an open-source superset of JavaScript: it adds static typing and compiles to clean, standards-based JavaScript.
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.
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.
OpenClaw is the viral, open-source, autonomous AI agent: a self-hosted 'digital employee' that executes real-world tasks across your local machine and messaging platforms 24/7.
MCP is the open-source standard for securely connecting AI agents (like LLMs) to external tools, data, and enterprise workflows.
Python: The high-level, general-purpose language built for readability, powering everything from web backends to advanced machine learning models.
React is an open-source JavaScript library for building dynamic user interfaces (UIs).
Access Anthropic's state-of-the-art Claude models (Opus, Sonnet, Haiku) via the RESTful Messages API, integrating advanced AI capabilities directly into your applications.
Deno is the secure, modern runtime for JavaScript, TypeScript, and WebAssembly (built on V8 and Rust) that provides a complete, zero-config toolchain.
GCP delivers Google's global infrastructure (Compute Engine, BigQuery) for secure, scalable cloud solutions and AI/ML innovation.
"The vibe is spot on with minimal admin and a focus on digging in and hacking and not taking it too seriously. The sponsors were also a great match for the theme. The handbook was useful and thorough."
"I thought it was perfect. Some of the submissions were very impressive and useful and fun."
"Encouraging networking is great, allowing people to share what they work on is a good ice breaker"
"I loved the lecture — it was full of valuable insights and practical coding examples. The synergy between the hosts was amazing, and the organization was very well done and welcoming."
"I thought the format and keeping people to strict limits was great and kept presentations going."
"All the demos! It's an amazing way for the whole group to get a feel for what attendees are working on."
"Great example for how so many people can apply AI to the spreadsheets they likely spend a lot of time in already"
"I thought this was an awesome idea and app. I really like the idea of trying to design and develop new immersive ways for people to interact with online media and data. Looking forward to seeing the progression of your application. Great Job"
"It would be great to link to the handbook directly in the email since I couldn’t find it until well after the hack started."
"Loved the environment. Super comfy and welcoming. It was a pleasure having the opportunity to learn and work on our hackathon project here."
Last updated: August 2026