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AI Tinkerers Orange County: Tuesday, July 21, 2026 at Centercode
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Hands-On AI Implementation and Technical Show-and-Tell
On Tuesday, July 21st, AI Tinkerers Orange County gathers at Centercode’s new HQ office in Orange County (new address to be provided) for an evening dedicated to the technical reality of building with foundation models and generative AI. This is a room for engineers, researchers, and technical founders who are moving beyond chat interfaces to deploy autonomous workflows, agentic systems, and custom LLM integrations.
🗓️ Event Details
- Date: Tuesday, July 21st, 2026
- Time: 6:00 PM - 8:00 PM
- Location: Centercode’s offices, Orange County, CA (Detailed address released to accepted attendees)
- Capacity: Limited to 50 practitioners
Agenda:
- 5:30 PM: Doors Open & Networking
- 6:00 PM - 7:30 PM: Community Demos & Q&A
- 7:30 PM - 8:00 PM: Networking, Science Fair & Technical Breakouts
- 8:00 PM: Wrap up, out
🛠 The Format: Demos, Not Decks
In keeping with the Homebrew Computer Club ethos, we prioritize live code and working systems over slide decks. We want to see the internals: your orchestration layers, prompt engineering strategies, and the hard-earned lessons from debugging agentic loops.
Demo Guidelines:
- Show, Don’t Tell: Run your project live or walk through the implementation.
- Expose the Internals: Share the configs, workflow graphs, and code.
- Teach, Don’t Sell: Focus on the “how” behind the build, not a product pitch.
Venue Sponsor and Partner
Centercode - Centercode provides an end-to-end customer validation and user testing platform designed to help hardware, software, and IoT companies manage beta testing and dogfooding programs. Trusted by major global brands including Adobe, GoPro, Logitech, and Plantronics, Centercode leverages advanced testing tools, automated feedback triage, and proprietary AI User Testing Agents to help product managers, QA leads, and engineering teams resolve critical bugs and gather real-world insights before launching products.
Meetup Sponsors and Partners
Enterprise Technology Partners, a full service technology channel agency. Helping customers design, implement, and manage technology solutions in conjunction with our partners that include over 300 service providers. Thomas Spooner founded Enterprise Technology Partners in 2001. Since then, ETP has offered telecom and IT consulting to customers worldwide, helping customers realize benefits from the myriad of technologies available through our suppliers. ETP provides customers with a fast and cost effective way to engage experienced telecom industry professionals without requiring time consuming and expensive consulting arrangements.
Structured - Structured, a premier IT solutions provider, proudly sponsors the AI Tinkerers meetup. For over 30 years, they have excelled in bridging digital divides through secure, cloud-connected infrastructure and tailored IT strategies. Their unique blend of security expertise, cloud fluency, and digital infrastructure know-how positions them at the forefront of technological innovation. By supporting this meetup, they aim to foster the same spirit of creativity and problem-solving that drives their award-winning solutions, exploring AI’s potential in transforming businesses and tackling real-world challenges.
We are currently seeking technical partners who want to support the OC builder community. If your company provides compute, infrastructure, or tooling that actively accelerates builders, please reach out.
Explore Sponsorship Opportunities
Community & Demos
🥽 Speakers
Build your own harness
Vivek Haldar
Founder @ Chatlets
Event photos
Registration and Curation
AI Tinkerers is a curated community. We prioritize active builders who can contribute to the technical depth of the room. Registration requires providing technical context (GitHub, LinkedIn, or specific project details) to ensure every conversation is high-signal.
Due to high demand and limited capacity, we maintain a strict screening process. Register now to secure your place on the waitlist for review.
AI Tinkerers Orange County Stats
- Attendees: This exclusive community of 301 technical professionals features a powerful split between hands-on AI engineers (55%) and executive founders or product leaders (45%). Key expertise spans agentic workflows, LLM fine-tuning, and robust cloud infrastructure. Notably, the group is distinguished by deep roots in aerospace defense, enterprise SaaS, and a rare regional concentration of edge-AI and robotics hardware innovators.
- Companies Represented: Featuring tech giants like Google, Amazon, AMD, TikTok, and Microsoft, alongside rising innovators and startups such as PostHog, Moveworks, Fivetran, Anduril Industries, Liftoff Mobile, camel-ai.org, and more
- Demos: 31 demos have been submitted and 25 have been presented. The most exciting themes have emphasized fine-tuning and personalization, agent orchestration with verification and bounded harnesses, and local/on-device workflows that cut cost and speed iteration. Technical highlights have also covered agent-friendly architectures, feedback/trace-driven improvement, multimodal media pipelines, data-grounding with graphs/embeddings, and deployment efficiency via routing, batching, and caching.
- Testimonials:
Let’s Build.
