Month 5 at the AI Lab: Our Biggest Meetup Yet
Month 5 - our biggest meetup ever with 30+ attendees with an inspiring founder talk from Kenneth Eversole
Our Biggest Meetup Yet
May 21st was our largest night to date - 30+ people filled the lab. And people are making awesome progress! Some folks who had ideas a few months ago have returned demoing shipped apps — a payroll mobile app, a real-estate concierge app.
Token Costs and Running Local
With token costs climbing, the news round kept circling one idea: run easy requests on a local model and fall back to frontier (SOTA) models only when needed. The open tooling is catching up — Qwen is Darin's pick for local quality, Google's Gemma is built to run efficiently on laptops and small devices, and OpenCode is the coding agent that can drive either one in place of a paid API. The catch: capable local models still demand serious RAM and setup time. Security came up too — an open-weight model like Hermes is safer than an agent like OpenClaw, which takes full system access (files, shell, browser, integrations) and a much larger attack surface. Run the model yourself and it just answers; your data never leaves the machine.
Prompt Tips from Mario Guerra
Mario Guerra shared two quick wins. LLMs are lazy, so make self-critique a standard step — ask the model to poke holes in its own answer before you trust it. And try the "Sherlock Holmes" prompt: opening with "You are Sherlock Holmes" pushes the model into deliberate, deductive reasoning, which is great for hard bugs where the obvious causes are already ruled out.
Kenneth Eversole: From Big Tech to Founder
Kenneth Eversole shared how is building his AI company OpsCompanion after working at Balto and Cloudflare. His message: tenacity — talk to business owners again and again until the problem comes into focus. Same goes for hiring in the AI era; screen for high-agency, tenacious people who can get stuff done. Kenneth is one of those genuinely inspiring people in the St. Louis tech scene, and the lab was lucky to have him in the room.
Sovereign Data
His recurring theme was "sovereign data": keep sensitive info and PII on your own hardware, and redact business details before anything reaches an external LLM — once data leaves, you lose control of it. He pointed to the ACR's AI-LAB framework as a model for protecting PII that other privacy-sensitive industries can borrow.
A Pivotal Platform Shift
Kenneth put AI alongside pivotal technologies like the database, the PC, and the web — each one reset who gets to participate. AI's promise: teach the world to use computers and extend that leverage to billions. His challenge to St. Louis's "inferiority complex" — take your dream and 10x it!