Sunday, May 17, 2026
Two days after our first Building the State of the Art (BSOTA) meetup, the community repo had 439 new lines of techniques, hooks, and architecture notes that attendees had worked out that night.
BSOTA is a recurring room in Hayes Valley where people working with agentic coding tools come to share what's working. Each session, practitioners demo techniques, build alongside each other, and write the learnings back to a shared repo at github.com/bsota/collective. Last session, Daniel Imberman walked us through running parallel Claude Code agents with Conductor.
Most AI work still happens alone. You can ask Claude what works, but the signal from someone who lives and breathes the same problem is a different thing. The repo is the compounding asset, a time capsule of how the state of the art evolves, written by the people doing the work.
That state of the art moves fast. We're shifting to a bi-weekly cadence, starting with BSOTA #3 on Tuesday, May 26. Come ready to discover new ways to build and write what you learned back to the repo.
See you tomorrow at Builders Night, The Commons, 550 Laguna St.
- Lee
Coming up at Rally
Builders Night
2026-05-18 · 6:30 PM - 9:00 PM
Monday co-working for AI builders. Two hours of focused build time with a share-back round to close.
AI Research Circle: Physical AI
2026-05-25 · 7:00 PM - 8:45 PM
Atharva Atre (Niantic Spatial) walks through the five technical layers Physical AI runs on, from simulated training environments to spatial intelligence.
Building the State of the Art: Agentic Builders, Comparing Notes
2026-05-26 · 6:45 PM - 8:45 PM
Bi-weekly community event for builders working with agentic coding tools, with techniques going back to a shared repo at github.com/bsota/collective.
Around SF this week
Monday, May 18, 6 PM
Weekly OpenClaw community night at Frontier Tower for people building Personal Agents, where beginners leave with a working agent and intermediate attendees go deeper on multi-agent workflows, security, and token optimization. Mentor-heavy format, drop in at any experience level.
Tuesday, May 19, 3 PM - 8 PM
Three hours of build time at the AWS Builder Loft on Neo4j Context Graphs paired with AWS Strands, after a hands-on tech briefing from Neo4j and AWS developer advocates. Doors at 3:00, demos at 7:30, wrap at 8:00.
Wednesday, May 20, 5:30 PM - 8:30 PM
Convex, PostHog, and AgentMail demo their new full-stack integrations for AI agents, including PostHog's first-party logging inside Convex plus executor.sh and AgentMail's runtime hooks. Four short demos starting at 6:15 PM with networking and food after, good for builders shipping production agent infrastructure.
Thursday, May 21, 3 PM - 6 PM
Panel at SVB with Miro's Yuliya Malysh and Łukasz Sągol, ElevenLabs' Shaheen Lavie-Rouse, and SVB's Robert Parker moderating, on what it actually takes to build and go to market as an AI-native company. Three hours of structured discussion on engineering team structure and GTM strategy for founders and operators pre-seed through Series B+.
Thursday, May 21, 5:30 PM - 9:30 PM
Volume 2 of a real-time video generation series, with talks from ValkaAI and one external builder and a rooftop networking close. Doors at 5:30, talks 6:00 to 7:45, networking through 9:30.
Friday, May 22, 9:30 AM - 6 PM
A full-day mini conference on shipping AI in production, with sessions on multi-agent orchestration, authorization for agents, and AI evaluation. Hosted by OSS4AI, the 43k-developer community behind r/AI_Agents.