Build Night: Self-Improving Agents | Loop Engineering
One evening. One self-improving agent framework. Your build.
Hexo Labs' open-source SIA framework rewrites both an agent's harness and its model weights in one closed loop. At the June emergency hackathon, teams pushed it into law, biology, GPU kernels, and agent tooling in a single day.
This Build Night compresses that energy into one focused evening — with the repo in your hands days before doors open, so the night is pure building.
⚠️ GETTING IN — TWO-STEP REGISTRATION
AWS requires every attendee to register in their system for building access. After you're approved here, you must ALSO register at https://events.builder.aws.com/zV1dm9 — no AWS registration, no entry, no exceptions. Register under the name on your ID. Two minutes, do it right away.
Entrance is up the stairs on the SW side of 525 Market (next to Chipotle); elevator access via the main lobby.
THIS BUILD NIGHT
Every attendee gets early access to the Build Night repo ahead of the event. Arrive with your environment running and an idea scoped; leave with a working project and a 3-minute demo.
Format: teams of 2–4 · two tracks · short demos · one winner per track.
Track 1 — Applied SIA: point SIA at a real domain task (science, law, code, finance, agents — your call) and show measurable self-improvement.
Track 2 — Framework & Research: improve SIA itself — harness upgrades, self-improvement methodology, or novel evaluation.
WHY SIA
From the paper (SIA: Self Improving AI with Harness & Weight Updates, Hebbar et al., 2026):
— 502% improvement on single-cell RNA denoising
— 91.9% runtime reduction on GPU kernels
— 56.6% gain on LawBench
The framework is open source (MIT): github.com/hexo-ai/sia. Pre-reads and quickstart ship to registrants five days before the event.
AGENDA
5:00 PM — Doors open · food · final team formation
5:30 PM — Opening: SIA in 15 minutes (Hexo Labs) + environment and compute orientation
6:00 PM — Build
7:45 PM — Submissions close (GitHub repo required)
7:50 PM — Demos: 3 minutes per team, live Q&A from judges
8:20 PM — Winners announced · prizes · group photo
8:30 PM — Doors close (hard stop)
COMPUTE
Environment setup instructions and compute details for the night ship in your pre-event package alongside the repo. Arrive with everything running; build at full speed from minute one.
GROUND RULES
Repo access opens days before the event — setup, exploration, and idea-scoping in advance are encouraged. The build itself happens in the room; judges weigh what was made on the night.
Submit via [FORM LINK] by 7:45 PM sharp: GitHub repo required, track selected, video optional.
Teams of 2–4 (solo allowed, teaming encouraged).
WHO SHOULD ATTEND
— Engineers building agents, evals, or training/inference loops
— ML researchers interested in self-improvement methods and benchmarks
— Founders and technical operators exploring SIA for their domain
— Anyone who wants an evening of uninterrupted building next to people worth knowing
Capacity is limited. Approval required.
We will take photos and short video clips for event recap and promotion. By attending, you consent to being photographed and recorded, and to the use of those images and clips by the organizers on social media and other event marketing channels.
HOSTED BY
Frontier Syndicate is a private venture circle connecting frontier tech researchers, builders, and investors through curated convenings and early-stage capital. Across the Bay Area, we host a recurring series of research forums, builder nights, and intimate investor dinners — and back exceptional companies emerging from the labs, communities, and technical networks we convene.
Hexo Labs is the team behind SIA, the open-source self-improving AI framework that updates both the agent harness and the underlying model weights, and AIE-Bench, a benchmark for whether AI systems can build and improve other AI systems.
AWS — this Build Night runs at the AWS Builder Loft San Francisco.