Living in the Future: What I Learned at AI Tinkers
I went to another AI Tinkers meetup yesterday. If you haven’t been, AI Tinkers is basically today’s Homebrew Computer Club — people on the bleeding edge of AI, strapping together advanced tools to build raw, useful stuff for themselves and their friends. The presentations aren’t sexy. Nothing is polished. It’s just people doing cool shit.
What I love most is the vibe. You’re not pitching to VCs. You’re not selling to customers. You’re sharing with peers. The guard comes down, questions fly, and conversations stay real. I’ve now hit meetups in four different cities, and the pattern is clear: the smaller the group, the better it gets. Once it grows, it turns into a business-card swap and pitch competition. Keep it small and informal, and you actually get to know people over time.
What always blows my mind is how far ahead the room is. These folks aren’t just ahead of mainstream tech news, they’re ahead of the next technical peer who doesn’t show up to these things. Meanwhile, normal people (my mom, your mom) are still using ChatGPT to ask questions they would’ve Googled. Maybe they generate a picture on Grok or use a writing assistant in docs. That’s about it.
And that’s okay. It’s actually exciting.
Because when you’re willing to invest the time to really understand these tools and build with them, you’re living years ahead of everyone else. That gap creates massive opportunity. I have time to make postal.wtf better before the normies show up. But it also creates a real marketing challenge: we need simple, delightful products that give people that first “wow, AI just did something useful for me” moment.
Right now, using AI for most people is like swiping a credit card at the grocery store. Meanwhile, the frontier is like thinking about dinner and having it appear fully cooked in front of you. The is a huge gap in between, but the magic is already possible, it’s just most people don’t know it even exists; normal people around you don’t even think about the possibility of the magic being real.
Some of us are already living in the future, and that’s both humbling and a hell of an opportunity.
Even within the builder community, I see the same pattern repeating across every city I’ve visited: a ton of people are quietly working on the same open-source tools. Search for one problem and you’ll find twenty different solutions. It makes choosing incredibly hard. Pick one today, and you might want to switch tomorrow. The good news is switching costs are still low because nothing’s baked into big products yet. The bad news? You can think you’ve built something great with real users, only to wake up tomorrow with zero because everyone quietly moved to the next shiny fork.
This is exactly what happened in the 1980s computer boom. Dozens of home computers and gaming consoles flooded the market. Most died. IBM PC won because it created a standard everyone could copy, triggering massive network effects. Nintendo dominated consoles by building an ecosystem people didn’t want to leave. The winners weren’t always the most advanced — they were the ones that made switching too painful or created something so new that everyone eventually had to come to them. The same thing is playing out right now in AI.
My theory is there are two ways to win here. Either you try to be the very best tool in one of these crowded categories and maintain your competitive advantage until only one tool is left standing. Or, you build something today that isn’t yet obvious for the people using AI tomorrow — so that when the masses arrive, your tool is the one they have to come to. Starting in a very niche field now with only a small number of users gives you a head start that competitors will have to work a lot harder to catch up to.
If you haven’t been to to AI Tinkers meetup yet, see if there’s one available in your city. aitinkerers.org . If you are technical, your peers will inspired you, and if you are not technical, you can come and ask questions, and believe me, that will be very helpful to the technical folks.
Cheers,
Kirill.
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