Simon Willison to Host SF Agentic Engineering Meetup

Simon Willison and Jesse Vincent have announced an upcoming Birds of a Feather session in San Francisco, scheduled for Wednesday, October 14. The evening gathering aims to bring together software developers, researchers, and hobbyists who are actively building applications with and on top of autonomous coding agents. Instead of formal product pitches or marketing presentations, the event is structured as an informal, flowing conversation and show-and-tell designed to explore the early, unconventional boundaries of agentic engineering.

The organizers are specifically encouraging attendees to share unfinished projects, odd experiments, and tools that do not yet have an obvious commercial market. According to Willison, the goal is to compare notes on what builders are learning, what they are trying to solve, and what challenges they have yet to figure out. By focusing on early-stage explorations rather than polished products, the session seeks to embrace the unpredictable and unusual nature of current agentic AI developments.

The event is sponsored by Teleport, a company that recently highlighted its own experiments in the space. Teleport shared insights from a project where 13 engineers spent 90 days using large language models to pressure wash their codebase. Their primary finding was that prioritizing quality over quantity is essential when using AI models to identify security vulnerabilities.

For AI practitioners and software engineers, this meetup represents a growing shift toward collaborative, community-driven problem-solving in the rapidly evolving field of agentic workflows. As autonomous coding agents become more integrated into software development pipelines, informal forums allow builders to bypass corporate messaging and directly address the practical, often chaotic realities of deploying these systems in real-world scenarios.