Simon Willison is hosting an evening gathering in San Francisco on 14 October with Jesse Vincent for developers working with coding agents. The event functions as an informal show-and-tell where attendees compare notes on their current projects and share what they have yet to solve. Participants are encouraged to present unfinished experiments or odd ideas that lack a clear market application. The session explicitly avoids product pitches in favour of discussing early-stage explorations of agentic AI systems. Willison describes the current state of this technology as inherently strange and suggests the group should celebrate that unusual quality rather than trying to normalise it immediately.
This gathering matters because the field of agentic engineering is currently defined by significant uncertainty and a lack of established best practices. Builders often work in isolation without access to peer feedback on their specific architectural choices or failure modes. Bringing these practitioners together allows for the exchange of tacit knowledge regarding how to actually construct and debug these systems. It creates a space for honest discussion about the difficulties involved in moving beyond simple script generation towards more autonomous behaviour.
- Focuses on work not yet discussed publicly
- No formal presentation required
- Hosted by Simon Willison and Jesse Vincent
