Every month, we cut through the noise and surface 7 AI-focused Bay Area events worth attending — no endless Luma scrolling required.
Your shortcut to amazing AI events.
The drop
October 2026
7 picksupdated October 1
10/4Sun Oct
Cyberdeck Workshop (SF)
2–5pm · tiat, 151 Powell St, Union Square
HardwareWorkshop
WHY GO
Build your own mini cyberdeck from scratch — Raspberry Pi, color display, MicroPython, every component on the table. Three hours taught by Sage Cadence (Stanford EE, 200k+ followers) and co-teacher Amy, from zero electronics experience to a working personal computer you take home. All materials, tools, free matcha and access to the builders' community included. $200 and you walk out with the thing in your hand.
A one-day conference for AI, security and technology leaders building the agentic enterprise — curated sessions and peer-to-peer conversations on AI adoption, identity governance and AI security. Speakers include Karl McGuinness (ex-Okta Chief Product Architect), Travis McPeak (SpaceXAI security), Derek Chamorro (Head of Security, Together AI) and Àyodélé Àbéjídé (Senior Staff Eng, Brex). Registration is free; sold out before SF Tech Week opened.
Pixels After Dark: Art, Music & Computer Use Agents
5–8pm · Simular, 3359 26th St, Mission
ArtsAgents
WHY GO
A different kind of SF Tech Week night. Simular — the team that got Agent S to human-level performance on OSWorld — opens their Mission space to artists, humanists and computer-use builders for one question: when computers do the work, what happens to humans? Former OpenAI and DeepMind builders, a Shakespeare scholar from Stanford, a surprise artist, retro-futuristic pixel portraits, live music, drinks and hands-on time with autonomous computers.
Hugging Face throws the kickoff party for Open Source AI Week, free for everyone, at The Midway. 6pm meetup with community demos, light bites and drinks; 9pm the DJs come on and the room becomes a dance floor until midnight. Thirty-six Space demos, collectible HF swag for the first 500 through the door, and the full open-weights crowd — Arcee, Ai2, Unsloth, Nous Research, vLLM, LMSYS. 1,271 going.
Four hands-on workshops in one day led by the teams actually shipping agent infra. Build a Competitive Intelligence Agent with Nimble; design and observe the loops running your agents with Comet Opik; then an evening demo night with audience voting, prizes, cash and credits. Lab partners: Comet, Nimble, Nexla. Capacity strictly limited, approval required. Pizza, drinks, and a working agent at the end of it.
Emergent — VibeCon SF 2026: Vibecode Your Way to a YC Interview
8am Sat → 6:30pm Sun · Y Combinator, 560 20th St, Dogpatch
HackathonHeadliner
WHY GO
Not your regular hackathon. 175 hand-picked builders — founders, engineers, PMs, designers, operators, people from sales and finance — spend the weekend at Y Combinator's SF office turning ambitious ideas into working products with AI. Past finalists had never written code and still shipped real products. Winner gets a direct YC interview + $10,000; runner-up $5k; third $3k; top 10 pitch on the main stage. Every builder: free Emergent credits, partner perks, and swag. Hero Sponsor: MongoDB. Request your spot via events.ycombinator.com.
Bring your unfinished obsession. The robot that finally moves. The agent that does real work. The strange interface. Five hours to ship something real at Founders, Inc.'s 42,000 sq. ft. Fort Mason campus — then at 10pm the room becomes a museum of what came alive tonight. Hardware, software, or both. Working demos only. No pitch decks. Teams up to four, every teammate applies individually.
