Sunday, July 26, 2026
When we ran a Research Circle on physical AI in May, people showed up building actuators, autonomous drones, surgical tools, and robotic art. Most of that work happens alone, and hardware needs a bench and someone nearby who has hit your bug.
So we're building it. Degrees of Freedom is a monthly working night at Mission Robotics starting August 18, for the robot that's 80% assembled and the sim that refuses to transfer.
A week later we're at The Forest, Niantic Spatial's space in the Ferry Building, for Physical AI: What's Working (and What Still Breaks). Niantic and special guests demo live, then a panel on the parts that still fall over. Approved by hand, so register early.
Monday, though, is where the week starts: Builders Night at The Commons, 6:30, bring a project.
Lee
Coming up at Rally
Builders Night
2026-07-27 · 6:30 PM - 9:00 PM
Weekly coworking for builders across software, hardware, business, and creative projects. Two hours of focused work alongside others, plus a share-back where you learn what stuck people and what shipped.
Builders Night
2026-08-03 · 6:30 PM - 9:00 PM
A weekly co-working session where builders show up with projects and leave with momentum through focused deep work and supportive share-backs. Perfect if building alone feels isolating and you need the energy of working alongside people actually making things.
Degrees of Freedom: Bring Your Own Robot
2026-08-18 · 6:00 PM - 9:00 PM
A monthly working night at Mission Robotics for solo robotics builders who trained policies at home and need actual labmates. Two hours of focused bench time, debugging help from people who've hit your exact problems, and a space designed for hardware work.
Physical AI: What's Working (and What Still Breaks)
2026-08-25 · 5:00 PM - 8:00 PM
Live demos across the robotics stack, perception, mapping, simulation, policies, hardware, from builders whose systems actually run. Then everyone who demoed sits down for a panel on what still breaks: failure modes, the gap between simulation and reality, and the datasets nobody has.
Around SF this week
Tuesday, Jul 28, 5:30 PM - 8:00 PM
Lightning talks on shipping multimodal systems that hold up in production: Adham Fawal (Vapi) on scaling voice agents from one call to ten thousand, Andrew Hinh (Modal) on pitting RL-trained models against each other in Street Fighter III.
Tuesday, Jul 28, 6:00 PM - 9:00 PM
Brace Sproul of LangChain and Jacob Teo of Cognition on LLM wikis, the emerging pattern for agent memory. Jacob presents Cognition's DeepWiki, and the open question on the table is whether wikis are even the right abstraction for context.
Wednesday, Jul 29, 5:30 PM - 8:00 PM
Groundcover triggers a real anomaly on stage and lets its agent ingest the telemetry, isolate the cause, and open a patch through GitHub. Matt Brown from groundcover with Maggie Baxter from incident.io.
Wednesday, Jul 29, 5:30 PM - 8:30 PM
An embodied AI night covering world models, robot learning, VLA systems, and sim-to-real, with a live robot demo on the floor. Light dinner at 5:30, presentations at 6:30, and registration needs approval.
Wednesday, Jul 29, 6:00 PM - 8:00 PM
Vicky Firth from Granola on what actually changes when your support team can vibe-code a fix. Moderated by Youmna Sirgi, Head of Operations at Plain, and the real question is where the support and engineering line now sits.
Wednesday, Jul 29, 6:00 PM - 9:00 PM
Emergent just closed a Series C and is opening its new SF office with drinks, passed bites, and some product news. Co-hosted with Judgment Labs, no panels.
Thursday, Jul 30, 5:30 PM - 7:30 PM
Kwindla Hultman Kramer, co-founder of Daily and founder of Pipecat, on building AI-native software, with Postman, dari.dev, and CodeRabbit on cache-aware routing and agent interfaces. Architecture-level and practical.
Thursday, Jul 30, 5:30 PM - 8:30 PM
Jiquan Ngiam of MintMCP on running a whole business with AI teammates across sales, support, and engineering, plus Viren Baraiya of orkes.io, who created Netflix Conductor. Demos from practitioners actually shipping on MCP.
Thursday, Jul 30, 5:30 PM - 9:30 PM
Spatial Frontier Club brings the SIGGRAPH conversation back to the Bay: short technical talks on 3D generative AI, world models, and spatial computing. Ke Jing of PICO/ByteDance leads the confirmed lineup.
Thursday, Jul 30, 6:00 PM - 8:00 PM
Vercel's COO built go-to-market at Stripe before this, and she's in conversation with Baseten president Dannie Herzberg on turning developer tools into infrastructure. Part of Baseten's Heavyweights series.
Thursday, Jul 30, 6:30 PM - 9:30 PM
Happy hour with founders and engineers shipping agents into real-world workflows, hosted with EliseAI's cofounder and CTO. Drinks, appetizers, and shop talk.