This month we're building something real, live, for a real person.

THE BRIEF: A local bilingual early-childhood teacher wants to turn years of classroom experience into printable Spanish/English curricula for children ages 1-5: weekly and monthly plans, plus ready-to-print activities for math, language, art, sensory play and motor skills. Teachers, childcare centers and families buy a download, print it and use it the same day. The plan: sell on Teachers Pay Teachers and Etsy, promote on Pinterest, and let AI help with ideas, organization and promotion without losing the teacher's own voice.

TONIGHT WE BUILD IT TOGETHER WITH CLAUDE CODE, starting from the teacher's written brief:

• A draft generator: pick an age, theme, skill and language, and get a weekly plan with learning objectives and matching activities, in both Spanish and English
• The teacher's voice, not the model's: a style guide and real examples so drafts sound like the teacher, with the teacher reviewing and approving every piece
• Print-ready output: a cover, instructions, the weekly plan and activity pages as letter-size PDFs
• Quality checks: age-appropriateness, bilingual accuracy, originality, and images that are safe to sell
• Selling without sending files: automatic delivery on the marketplaces, plus draft listings, preview images and Pinterest pins

WHY COME IF YOU'RE NOT A TEACHER? The pattern is the same one behind most useful AI products: AI drafts, a human approves, and the system packages and delivers. You'll see how to scope it, where AI helps, where it needs a human, and what it takes to make the output good enough to sell.

Bring a laptop to build along, or just bring questions. Beginners and veterans welcome. Hablantes de espanol bienvenidos.

EVENT DETAILS Food, drinks and conversation from 7:00. Short show & tell at 7:20. Live build from 7:30. Free to attend. Free parking at Gladstone Park SDA Church.

Vibe coding: tips, tricks, and the tool landscape

Everyone in the room is already coding with AI. Almost nobody agrees on how to do it well — and the gap between the developer getting real leverage and the one getting expensive rework is no longer access to the tools. It's technique.

Last month we put a model in the product. This month we point the models at our own codebases. We'll start with the one idea everything follows from — generating code got cheap, and checking it didn't — then walk through nine specific, usable tips: the twenty-minute memory file that makes every future session smarter, how to make an agent plan before it touches a file, why three failed corrections means restart instead of argue, and how to read a diff a stranger wrote. Each one comes with a line you can copy.

Then we stop talking and do it. We'll take a real prompt from the room and fix it live against an eight-point rubric, and I'll run a real task on a real repo on screen — including the parts where the agent does something dumb, because knowing what that looks like is half the skill.

You'll leave with three things to change on Monday morning, and a set of offline pages — the tips, the prompt rubric, and a ten-tool comparison matrix — to take with you.

Bring one prompt that disappointed you this week, and one task you have to do next week. We'll use both.

Come curious. Beginners and veterans welcome.

SPEAKER

Matt Duffield is President & CTO of Summit Software with 30+ years building enterprise software. A published author of six technical books and U.S. Navy veteran, he now focuses on AI-assisted development, local LLMs, and cloud-native architecture — and mentors the next generation of coders in his spare time.

EVENT DETAILS

Food, drinks, and conversation beginning at 7:00. The talk begins around 7:30. Parking is free at the Gladstone Park SDA church.

RSVP: https://www.meetup.com/full-stack-dev-pdx/events/316190567/