SUPER FUNICULAR

Bring one thing you're building with AI and one thing that's broken about it. Two hours, a diner booth, coffee and pie. Grand Rapids, all skill levels.

We're doing show-and-tell on AI coding agents — what's genuinely working, what everyone's pretending works, and what to do when the agent confidently does the wrong thing.

I'll start us off with Digi-Bot, the agentic coding agent I'm building, including the parts that don't work yet. Then it's open floor.

WHO THIS IS FOR
Developers using Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot or similar. People who tried an AI agent and gave up. People who've never used one and want to see what the fuss is. Beginners genuinely welcome — if you have questions, you're the reason this is useful.

WHAT TO BRING
A laptop if you want to show something. Nothing at all if you'd rather listen. That's a completely fine way to attend a first one.

HOW THE EVENING GOES
8:00 — grab a seat, order something, introductions around the table
8:20 — I show Digi-Bot and what's currently defeating me
8:45 — open floor: anyone with something to show or ask
9:30 — whoever's still talking keeps talking

Food and drinks are on you and there's no cover. It's a 24-hour diner, so nobody's rushing us out.

An AI agent that can only talk is a demo. One that can read files, call APIs and change things is a tool. We're working on the gap. Grand Rapids, all levels.

Second session, new venue: City Built Brewing downtown. Bring a laptop if you want to build along, or just come and watch.

WHAT WE'RE DIGGING INTO
Giving an agent real tools — file access, shell, web, APIs. How MCP (Model Context Protocol) fits in and why it caught on. Where tool-calling reliably falls apart, and the guardrails that help. I'll show what's working and what's still defeating me in Digi-Bot.

WHO THIS IS FOR
Developers using Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot or the APIs directly. Anyone who's wired up an agent and watched it confidently do the wrong thing. Beginners welcome — questions are what make this useful.

HOW THE EVENING GOES
6:30 — grab a beer, find the table, introductions
6:50 — Digi-Bot's tool layer: what works, what doesn't
7:20 — open floor: bring a problem or something to show
8:30 — whoever's still talking keeps talking

No cover. Food and drinks are on you. City Built has real tables and it's quiet enough to actually hear each other.

You built something with AI. How do you know it works? We're doing evals — the unglamorous part that separates a demo from something you'd ship. All levels.

New home: Schuler Books on 28th Street, in the Chapbook Cafe. Coffee, real tables, and quiet enough to hear each other.

WHAT WE'RE DIGGING INTO
How to tell whether a prompt or an agent got better or just different. Writing a small eval set you'll actually run. Using a model to grade output, and where that quietly misleads you. Catching regressions before your users do.

WHO THIS IS FOR
Anyone shipping something with an LLM in it, and anyone who's noticed their AI feature works great in the demo and badly in real life. No prior eval experience assumed — that's the point.

HOW THE EVENING GOES
6:30 — coffee, introductions, what everyone's building
6:50 — I walk through the eval set I use on Digi-Bot, including what it failed to catch
7:20 — open floor: bring a project and we'll sketch an eval for it
8:30 — whoever's still talking keeps talking

Free to attend, no cover. Coffee and books are on you. Schuler Books, 2660 28th St SE — big parking lot, easy to find.

Frontier models are expensive and often unnecessary. We're working out what to run where, what caching actually saves, and how to stop a runaway agent burning your budget.

Schuler Books on 28th Street, in the Chapbook Cafe. Coffee, real tables, no cover.

WHAT WE'RE DIGGING INTO
When a small fast model is genuinely enough and when it isn't. Prompt caching and what it really cuts. Routing easy work to cheap models and hard work to expensive ones. Why an agent costs multiples of a chat turn, and what that means for anything you run on a schedule. Setting a ceiling before you get the bill.

WHO THIS IS FOR
Anyone paying for API calls, or about to. Anyone who's watched a bill jump and not known which part did it. Beginners welcome — this is the practical end of the subject.

HOW THE EVENING GOES
6:30 — coffee, introductions, what everyone's running
6:50 — real numbers from Digi-Bot: what each part costs me
7:20 — open floor: bring your setup and we'll find the waste
8:30 — whoever's still talking keeps talking

Bring a laptop if you want to dig into your own usage. Schuler Books, 2660 28th St SE — big parking lot.