Big Data Madison

Join us for a special hands-on “AI Coding Tools Demo Night” on Thursday, January 29th, 2026 at 6:00pm, hosted at the Madison College Truax campus. Over the course of two hours, 3–4 presenters will each use a different AI-assisted coding tool—Copilot, Cursor, Claude Code, Gemini, Codex, etc—to build the same small app from scratch in about 20 minutes each, from first prompt all the way through deployment. This is a great chance to see how these tools actually behave in real time and to ask questions about how people use them: prompting strategies, workflow tips, costs, subscription tradeoffs, and anything else you’re curious about. It’s not a competition—just a guided, practical way to learn what these tools can do.

The project itself is deliberately small and easy enough that most developers could quickly plan out how they'd build it: a lightweight aggregator for Madison Common Council member blog posts. Each presenter will create a simple static web app hosted on GitHub Pages that pulls new posts from the 20 alder blogs, supports filtering by alder and date range, includes basic search over recent posts, and publishes an optional RSS feed. All the backend work is handled through GitHub Actions and scheduled jobs that perform the scraping. Every presenter will get their own GitHub repo and will build the whole thing live so you can watch how different tools plan, scaffold, generate, debug, and deploy code.

You’re very welcome to bring your laptop and follow along. Our project description is available at https://github.com/Programming-with-AI/Civic-Hacking-Alder-Aggregator-Overview/ and we encourage anyone interested to fire up their own coding assistant and try building the app themselves as the demos run. Also, please feel free to take a look at the repository ahead of time, and chime in with suggestions for our initial prompts and a few other resources we'll provide that night by joining in the Github Discussions, or by opening a pull request.

We'll be in the Madison College Truax Main Building, at 1701 Wright Street. We'll be in the conference hall, which near the cafeteria. The room number is D1630, breakout rooms B and C, and is labeled as '21' on this map: https://madisoncollege.edu/files/media-document/2023-12/truax-first-floor.pdf

We recommend parking in the visitor lot, which can be accessed via Hoffman Street. The access code to the visitor lot will be #0146. If the lot is full, you can use the surrounding student stalls. There is also metered parking at the Anderson St entrance, near the meeting room. The Truax Building is also on the Bus Rapid Transit line, if you want to skip the driving and parking.

This will be a joint session of the MadAI Meetup and the Civic Hacking Madison Meetup, and we hope to make it a friendly, low-pressure, high-learning evening. If you’re a software developer who’s never touched an AI coding tool before, this is a perfect on-ramp—you’ll see multiple real workflows side-by-side, get a feel for how these assistants “think,” and a chance to see what you think is worth paying for (and what isn’t). And if you’re already using these tools daily, this is a chance to see how other developers structure prompts, debug with an agent, and collaborate with these models in practice. No matter your level of experience, you’ll come away with new ideas, new techniques, and a clearer sense of what these tools can add to your own development style. We’d love to see you there!