Concord Software Developers

What does it look like when a developer stops babysitting AI agents and actually lets them work? Lucas Ward will walk us through his basement-powered home lab, a Kubernetes-based platform built specifically to give AI agents the tools, guardrails, and context they need to execute real work autonomously.

Lucas has built an end-to-end CI/CD pipeline ecosystem designed for experimentation that's production-ready by default, not as an afterthought. He'll share how he uses OpenClaw, Claude Code, and Codex in distinct roles, how RAG services help agents get up to speed across different sessions and contexts, and how he benchmarks models against real-world tasks (not just leaderboard metrics).

If you've ever wondered what a disciplined, self-hosted agentic workflow actually looks like in practice, this one's for you.

What You'll Take Away:

• Why strict guardrails make AI more capable, not less
• How to architect an environment where agents can work without constant hand-holding
• A practical look at running multiple AI tools in coordinated, specialized roles
• Insights on benchmarking models against tasks that actually matter

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🍕 What to Expect
• BYOL (Bring Your Own Lunch)
• Live demos & hands-on workflows
• Collaborative atmosphere with room for questions, experiments, and feedback

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👥 Who’s It For?
Tech folks, indie hackers, marketers, creatives (writers, designers, video editors), and startup founders—anyone working with or curious about AI tooling and automation.

You don’t have to be an expert—just bring your curiosity (and your laptop if you want to build along).

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Let’s turn big ideas into real tools—together.
Join us every 3rd Tuesday at Flywheel Cowork.

Sponsors

• FocalGroove provides groovy marketing and facilitation.
• Special thanks to Flywheel Coworking for providing our meeting space in their fantastic Concord facility!

Presented by Matt Parker

If your team has a scripts/ directory — in a CI repo, an infra project, anywhere — this one's for you.

Matt Parker will walk us through Shikomi (仕込み), an open-source CLI scaffolding tool he built after accidentally committing a credential to GitHub and hearing about it from the security team before he noticed himself. The name comes from a Japanese culinary term for mise en place — the preparation that happens before you start cooking. That philosophy is baked right into the tool.

While Shikomi was built with macOS administration in mind, the problem it solves — ungoverned shell scripts with no security tooling — is universal. The talk is framed for a general developer audience.

Shell scripts are everywhere in software teams: deployment hooks, CI setup, infrastructure automation, onboarding utilities. Yet most scripting workflows have none of the guardrails we apply to application code — no linting gates, no secret scanning, no versioning discipline. Shikomi fixes that by wiring the tools together so you don't have to. Think create-react-app, but for shell scripts: one command, answer a few prompts, and walk away with a fully scaffolded project with pre-commit hooks already running.

What Matt will cover:

• The incident — what happened, what it exposed, and why it's more common than people admit
• How Gitleaks, ShellCheck, and semantic versioning each solve one dimension of the problem
• A live demo of Shikomi scaffolding a project with all three tools pre-configured
• The two-tier validation model: local pre-commit hooks as Tier 1, GitHub Actions at the PR level as Tier 2 — and how a merge can trigger automated deployment from there
• How bump-version keeps version headers, READMEs, and CHANGELOGs in sync with one command
• A practical path to apply the same guardrails to your own existing scripts

No Mac admin or MDM experience required. If you write shell scripts, this talk is for you.

Come ready to ask questions. Bring your laptop if you want to follow along.

Important Parking and Directions
The address for the Cabarrus Center is 57 Union St. S Concord, NC 28025. Free parking is available in the Cabarrus County Parking Deck located at 81 Spring St. SW Concord, NC 28025. There is also the 3-hour Bicentennial Lot behind our building. Here is a map of downtown parking options for your reference.

Sponsors

• FocalGroove provides groovy marketing and facilitation.
• Special thanks to Flywheel Coworking for providing our meeting space in their fantastic Concord facility!

• FocalGroove provides groovy marketing and facilitation.
• Special thanks to Flywheel Coworking for providing our meeting space in their fantastic Concord facility!

Important Parking and Directions
The address for the Cabarrus Center is 57 Union St. S Concord, NC 28025. Free parking is available in the Cabarrus County Parking Deck located at 81 Spring St. SW Concord, NC 28025. There is also the 3-hour Bicentennial Lot behind our building. Here is a map of downtown parking options for your reference.

Sponsors

• FocalGroove provides groovy marketing and facilitation.
• Special thanks to Flywheel Coworking for providing our meeting space in their fantastic Concord facility!