Month 3 at the AI Lab: Cloud Agents, CalcPad, and Our Own Meetup Group
Month 3 - we launched our own Meetup group, demoed Cursor's cloud coding agent, heard about massive AI datacenter investments coming to the region, and learned how Mike Smick built an app with screenshots and Claude.
STL AI Lab Meetup Group
Big news this month -- we launched our own STL AI Lab Meetup group. After piggybacking on the St. Louis Gen AI Lab group for our first few events, it was time to give the AI Lab its own home online. We're already at 75 members and growing. If you haven't joined yet, come find us -- monthly meetups in Maplewood with demos, discussion, and good people building things with AI.
Cursor's Cloud Coding Agent
At our March 26th meetup, Dan kicked things off with a live demo of Cursor's new cloud coding agent -- a background agent that can take on entire coding tasks autonomously while you work on something else. We walked through how it spins up, how it handles multi-file changes, and where it shines versus where you still want to be hands-on. The garage door was up, the spring air was rolling in, and the crowd had plenty of questions about what this means for day-to-day dev workflows.
AI Datacenters Coming to the Region
Gary R., one of St. Louis's top electricians, gave us a fascinating ground-level view of the massive AI datacenter investments being built in the region. The scale of infrastructure going in is staggering -- and it's happening right here. Gary's perspective from the construction side gave everyone a real sense of how big the AI buildout actually is beyond the software world.
CalcPad: Screenshot-Driven Development
Mike Smick stole the show with his walkthrough of how he built CalcPad, a slick natural-language calculator app. His approach was beautifully practical: he fed Claude screenshots of existing calculator apps that he wanted to improve on, and iteratively built something better. No spec doc, no wireframes -- just screenshots and conversation. It's a great example of how AI-assisted development actually works when you meet it where it is. Check out CalcPad if you haven't -- it's a clean, useful tool.