Sunday, April 26, 2026
The Build Your Own LLM Workshop Saturday May 2 taught by Justin Angel quickly hit capacity. If a full-day workshop where you write a tokenizer and train a working model from scratch sounds appealing, add yourself to the waitlist. If demand stays high, we're going to look at producing a YouTube series of the full workshop so the people who can't show up Saturday can still work through it on their own time.
Speaking of YouTube, Daniel Imberman's talk from March is up: How 2 Engineers Rebuilt a $2M Platform in 2 Months with AI Agents. Three to five parallel Claude Code agents through Conductor, test harnesses replacing PR review, a 60-day production rebuild that cleared an insurance company's security review. Plus real talk about the cognitive tax of running multi-agent workflows and how to protect your peace while building.
See you tomorrow at Luke's talk on agentic architecture patterns.
— Lee
Community Spotlight
Carlo Andrea Conte
Desktop app for DJs and music makers to speed up visual workflows for performances and releases. Squeeze the synesthesia out of your tracks (vizloom.com).
Coming up at Rally
Building Agent Architectures: Design Decisions That Matter
2026-04-27 · 7:00 PM - 8:45 PM
Luke Bechtel on which architecture calls compound (tool patterns, memory, orchestration) and which are reversible enough to defer.
Build Your Own LLM - Full-Day Workshop [Waitlist, sign up anyway!]
2026-05-02 · 9:00 AM - 5:00 PM
Waitlist is open if a Saturday of writing a tokenizer and training a model from scratch is your idea of a good time.
AI Benchmarks for Human Flourishing
2026-05-04 · 6:45 PM - 8:45 PM
A talk on benchmarking AI for outcomes that matter on a five-year horizon: agency, well-being, flourishing. A nice change of pace if your past month has been all capability talk.
Builders Night
2026-05-11 · 6:30 PM - 9:00 PM
Two hours of focused building and share-back round to close including the question 'how can this group support you in your building journey?'
Around SF this week
Monday, Apr 27, 4 PM - 8 PM
Monday, May 4, 4:30 PM - 6:30 PM
Jason Crawford explores how humans can maintain meaningful agency as AI systems grow more capable. He'll dig into the practical tensions: when to delegate to AI, when to stay in the loop, and how to design systems that augment rather than replace human judgment. Expect frameworks you can actually apply to your own products and workflows.
Tuesday, May 5, 5 PM - 8 PM
Lukasz Kaiser — co-author of the original "Attention Is All You Need" paper — breaks down what's actually working in post-transformer architectures and what's just noise. You'll get a clear-eyed technical comparison from someone who built the thing everyone's trying to replace. Expect concrete benchmarks, architectural tradeoffs, and straight answers about where the field is headed.
Wednesday, May 6, 9 AM - 6 PM
Monday, Jun 22, 4:30 PM - 6:30 PM
Sridhar Ramaswamy built Snowflake from -1 (before founding) and scaled it to one of the biggest data infrastructure companies in history. He'll break down the early technical and go-to-market decisions that actually mattered, plus what he'd do differently knowing what works in AI infrastructure today. Perfect for founders thinking about horizontal infrastructure plays or trying to understand what "category creation" actually looks like in practice.