AI Events in St. Louis | AI Tinkerers Meetups 2026

AI Tinkerers St. Louis - AI Meetups, Events, and Builder Demos 2026

A photograph capturing an indoor business meeting or presentation where a speaker stands before a whiteboard and two screens, addressing an audience seated in modern, comfortable lounge furniture. The room features unique architectural elements, including wooden ceiling slats, exposed beams, and a large vertical moss or plant wall.. Text: EXIT o World. Perspectives Synthesize Customer [unreadable] Product Development Better Support BRIAN CELLARD AUTHORIZATION A[unreadable]
Meetup
2 days ago

AI Tinkerers St. Louis: June 2026 Meetup

Wednesday, June 3rd 5PM to 7:30PM
Dan Gower Calvin Horrell Anusha G. Sean Robb Michael Schertz Ian Robinson Shawn Bishop Drew McAllister Dennis Pellegrini Michael Groner Adam Butler Nate Allen Tushar Deore Grant Karlas Matt Mizell Howard Mitchell Brandon Day Akshay Danthi Austin Manoogian Kyle Cordes
+30

AI Tinkerers St. Louis hosted an in-person technical meetup for active builders to navigate the agentic internet, featuring live demos and Q&A, supported by Sketch Development Services.

A man is giving a presentation to an audience in a modern, open-plan office or event space. The presentation screen displays 'DeepAI Tracking Response', and a neon sign in the background reads 'STOP START START FINISH'.. Text: DeepAI Tracking Response
STOP START START FINISH
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Meetup
about 2 months ago

AI Tinkerers St. Louis: April 2026 Meetup

Tuesday, April 14th 5PM to 7:30PM
Tyler Dougherty Dan Gower Calvin Horrell Brian Collard Chris Deweese Kerry Ritter Rommel Villagomez Stephanie Keysacker Jack DiSalvatore Mandira Chhangani Lois Lewis Kaitlyn Forks Greg langston AARON REIFSCHNEIDER Albert Dobmeyer Isaac Musselwhite Phani Pendurthi John Rooster Rawers Kyle Cordes
+80

AI Tinkerers St. Louis hosted a technical show-and-tell focused on foundation models and generative AI, featuring live demos and networking, sponsored by Sketch Development Services.

A photograph capturing an indoor business meeting or presentation where a speaker stands before a whiteboard and two screens, addressing an audience seated in modern, comfortable lounge furniture. The room features unique architectural elements, including wooden ceiling slats, exposed beams, and a large vertical moss or plant wall.. Text: EXIT o World. Perspectives Synthesize Customer [unreadable] Product Development Better Support BRIAN CELLARD AUTHORIZATION A[unreadable]
Meetup
4 months ago

AI Tinkerers – St. Louis Meetup: February 4, 2026

Wednesday, February 4th 5PM to 7PM
Calvin Horrell Dan Gower Mario Guerra Matt Mizell David Neish Michelle Hamilton Adam Butler Daphne Visbal George Holmes Drew McAllister Olesia Mukha Nobel Khandaker Olivia Johns Mehul Kar Shelby Stephens Siddharth Sistla Than A Som Rooster Rawers Jim Evans David Bogue
+30

The code-first gathering focused on live demos, debugging, and peer feedback for active builders using foundation models, supported by Sketch Development.

A group of people are gathered in a casual indoor setting, likely an office or event space, with some seated at tables and others standing near a bar area adorned with graffiti art.
Meetup
8 months ago

AI Tinkerers - St. Louis October Meetup

Wednesday, October 22nd, 2025 5PM to 7PM
Calvin Horrell Tyler Dougherty Julia Jahnke James Nippert Adam Butler Brian Collard Anthony Melson Paula Kay Shiva Gautam Shailaja Suresh Lois Lewis Sekhar Nadella Daphne Visbal David Bogue Drew McAllister Scott Lois Lewis Josh Collier Mario Guerra Grant Karlas
+29

Practitioners demoed LLM projects, networked, and shared lessons at the in-person meetup, supported by sponsor Sketch Development.

The image shows a group of people sitting in chairs, seemingly attending a presentation or meeting. The setting appears to be an office or event space.
Meetup
12 months ago

AI Tinkerers - St. Louis Inaugural Meetup

Thursday, June 5th, 2025 5PM
Tyler Dougherty Frank Hopper Calvin Horrell Divyam Arora David Bogue Paula Kay Kerry Ritter Lois Lewis Nicholas Ragland Dan Gower Sahil Sinha Valeria Miranda Michael Groner Lois Lewis Mark Taylor Brian Compton Gary Kupferle Cody Frederick Luc Bonino Vik Chopra
+33

Practitioners actively building LLM applications connected for hands-on work and community demos. The screened event focused on collaboration and rapid experimentation within the AI scene.

Meet the Organizers

Dan Gower Calvin Horrell Tyler Dougherty

Best AI meetup in St. Louis for builders

AI Tinkerers St. Louis is a hands-on AI builder meetup with live demos, technical discussion, and no-pitch networking.

AI Tinkerers St. Louis is built for engineers, founders, researchers, product builders, and developers working on AI agents, multimodal and voice interfaces, RAG and knowledge systems, AI coding tools, workflow automation, evals, observability, and production AI infrastructure. Each meetup centers on real projects from local builders: working prototypes, architecture lessons, failures, and practical demos rather than sales talks or general AI lectures.

The St. Louis chapter is part of a 231-city global network with 110,000+ members, making AI Tinkerers the world's largest hands-on AI builder community. Members include AI engineers, ML researchers, developers, founders, and builders from the local St. Louis chapter.

A typical AI Tinkerers St. Louis meetup runs about three hours with live demos from local builders, technical Q&A, and networking. Demos are expected to show real systems or code, not sales decks. Check the upcoming events listed above for the next scheduled meetup. Most AI Tinkerers chapters run monthly, but frequency varies by city. Subscribe to the St. Louis chapter to get notified.

Local cadence
5 recent events
Format
Live demos, technical Q&A, no sales pitches
Audience
Screened AI builders, founders, researchers, and engineers

Best AI meetup in St. Louis for hands-on builders

AI Tinkerers St. Louis is the best AI meetup in St. Louis for hands-on builders who want live code demos, technical discussion, and no-pitch networking. The St. Louis chapter hosts in-person events for engineers, founders, researchers, and product builders working on AI agents, multimodal and voice interfaces, RAG and knowledge systems, AI coding tools, workflow automation, evals, observability, and production AI infrastructure. Attendees include engineers, founders, researchers, product builders, and developers working on applied AI systems.

What makes AI Tinkerers St. Louis different from other AI meetups?

AI Tinkerers St. Louis is screened, demo-first, and no-pitch. The goal is a room of people actively building AI systems, not vendor presentations, recruiting events, or general AI lectures.

Builder-only room

Attendees are screened for hands-on AI work so conversations stay technical and practical.

Live technical demos

Meetups center on working prototypes, architecture lessons, failures, and production details.

Global builder network

The St. Louis chapter is part of a 231-city network with 110,000+ members worldwide.

Topics at AI Tinkerers St. Louis

Claude Code

Anthropic's agentic coding tool: Unleash Claude's raw power directly in your terminal or IDE to turn complex, hours-long workflows into a single command.

Claude

Claude is Anthropic's flagship family of large language models (LLMs): a high-performance, Constitutional AI system built for safety, complex reasoning, and expert-level collaboration.

Python

Python: The high-level, general-purpose language built for readability, powering everything from web backends to advanced machine learning models.

TypeScript

TypeScript is an open-source superset of JavaScript: it adds static typing and compiles to clean, standards-based JavaScript.

AI agent

AI agents are autonomous software systems (driven by LLMs) that plan, reason, and execute complex, multi-step tasks without continuous human oversight.

Anthropic

Anthropic is a frontier AI safety and research company, developing the Claude family of large language models (LLMs) via its Constitutional AI framework.

BigQuery

BigQuery is Google Cloud's fully managed, serverless enterprise data warehouse, enabling petabyte-scale analytics via ANSI SQL with zero infrastructure management.

Claude-3

Claude-3 is Anthropic's state-of-the-art multimodal model family (Opus, Sonnet, Haiku), setting new industry benchmarks for intelligence, speed, and vision capabilities.

Cloud Run

Cloud Run is a fully managed, serverless platform: deploy and run containerized applications, scaling automatically from zero to thousands of instances.

Cloud SQL

A fully managed relational database service for MySQL, PostgreSQL, and SQL Server that automates backups, scaling, and failover.

Recent talks at AI Tinkerers St. Louis

Asha Somayajula
git-cli: Ollama Git Command Generator
Jun 3
A CLI tool that translates natural-language task descriptions into git commands using a local Ollama LLM
Asha Somayajula St. Louis
Brian Collard
Council - Concept to Alpha
Apr 14
Universal LLM aggregator that brings all chats and data to a single interface.
Brian Collard St. Louis
LLM Railway
Rommel Villagomez
"From Noise to Signal: How a Team of AI Agents Turns Global Supply Ch…
Apr 14
We built a supply chain intelligence platform that deploys a coordinated team of four AI agents to scan thousands of global new...
Rommel Villagomez St. Louis
React TypeScript
Chris Deweese
Computer Vision Pipeline for Drone Image Processing
Apr 14
With Claude Code and GitHub SpecKit, I built a local web app which allows me to upload images, define regions of interest, and ...
Chris Deweese St. Louis
Claude Code GitHub SpecKit
Kerry Ritter
Harness Engineering to Stop Waiting on AI and Defeat the "Dumb Zone"
Apr 14
We built a deterministic TypeScript harness that orchestrates multi-agent development pipelines, shifting our workflow from syn...
Kerry Ritter St. Louis
TypeScript Claude Code
Mark Tornga
MCP Agent Mail: Agent Coordination
Feb 4
I'll "show the code" of how I use the MCP Agent Mail system to monitor my wildlife detection computer vision continuous retrain...
Mark Tornga St. Louis
Claude MCP Agent Mail
Mario Guerra
IgnitionAI: AI Production Workflow
Feb 4
This presentation details a paradigm shift in software engineering where AI is the primary builder and the human is the Princip...
Mario Guerra St. Louis
Vertex AI Imagen
Matt Mizell
AI Fuel Pricing Production System
Feb 4
I am a former long time CIO at High Tech manufacturer Laird Technologies (15 years), and then DuPont (https://www.linkedin.com/...
Matt Mizell St. Louis
Grok3 Claude-3
David Neish
Infera: LangGraph Stock Market Agent
Feb 4
I’m demonstrating Infera, an app that automates stock market due diligence. Instead of manually looking up tickers, Infera take...
David Neish St. Louis
GPT-4 LangGraph
Anthony Melson
Gemini: Audit-Ready HSA Tracking
Oct 22
My solution takes receipts as input, and uses Gemini-2.5-Pro to extract the text from them and classify the expenses based on w...
Anthony Melson St. Louis
Gemini-2 Python
Adam Butler
Grok: No-Code Logistics AI
Oct 22
I’ve been developing general and single use apps using no-code and low-code tools to facilitate certain tasks required for inte...
Adam Butler St. Louis
ChatGPT Claude
Asha Somayajula
Vibe Coding: Building Life Bricks
Oct 22
My experience with vibe coding, code walk through the demo, prompts used for retrieving llm analysis.
Asha Somayajula St. Louis
Groq React

What are people saying about AI Tinkerers St. Louis?

  • "Great organization and well conducted, Calvin did a great job with introductions and the person helping with the speaker set up was more than helpful. Thank you."
    October 22, 2025 | Lead, Engineering AI Tinkerers - St. Louis October Meetup
  • "I had a great time meeting people interested in whats going on with ai."
    June 3, 2026 | Founder AI Tinkerers St. Louis: June 2026 Meetup
  • "I woke up in the middle of the night thinking about it ... how disruptive this is really going to be. I've watched lots of AI presentations ... that one really illustrated the impact that a few people and a bunch of agents can have. Great job."
    February 4, 2026 | Principal Analytics Architect, Supply Chain AI Tinkerers – St. Louis Meetup: February 4, 2026
  • "It's a great space for seeing the presentations, but also networking. Very comfortable."
    February 4, 2026 | Principal Analytics Architect, Supply Chain AI Tinkerers – St. Louis Meetup: February 4, 2026
  • "Slow down and let everything sink in! You had a lot of good stuff to cover and while it was great, could have been really impactful with more time to soak so to speak. Great job."
    June 5, 2025 | SVP Technology AI Tinkerers - St. Louis Inaugural Meetup
  • "Entertaining use of AI. Love the demo and how he showed early results compared to the improved results in just a few months of time."
    June 5, 2025 | GM AI Tinkerers - St. Louis Inaugural Meetup
  • "Great hospitality and generous with the space and beverages."
    June 5, 2025 | GM AI Tinkerers - St. Louis Inaugural Meetup
  • "I know the world of AI is nascent, but I’d hope to see presentations focus on the challenge they faced, the data set at hand, and how specific tools and practices helped or didn’t help solve their challenge."
    October 22, 2025 | Consultant AI Tinkerers - St. Louis October Meetup
  • "Really appreciated showing the product then diving in and talking about your mental models (LT vs. ST memory, etc.). Helpful to all for our own journeys!"
    June 5, 2025 | SVP Technology AI Tinkerers - St. Louis Inaugural Meetup
  • "Thanks for creating an engaging, safe space to share & learn."
    February 4, 2026 | Training & Development Specialist AI Tinkerers – St. Louis Meetup: February 4, 2026

Last updated: June 2026