AIO-007: Context Maxxing
This month, we're exploring the art of making AI understand what the hell you actually want it to do - feeding it the right information, instructions, memory, tools and context before it confidently wanders off into the wilderness.
We've got two short talks covering RAG, real-world context engineering, voice, agents and intent, with practical examples from designers and engineers using this stuff in production today.
No AI 101. No 45-minute AI SaaS demo hostage situations. No thought leadership. Just people doing the actual work.
Agenda
5:30pm - 6:00pm: Optional early doors to our AI-pilled space at the BuildPass offices.
Come straight from work for some food, drinks and a chat, or arrive at 6:00pm for the official start. (Nothing important will happen before then).
6:00pm - 6:30pm: Meet and chat with fellow AI optimists (designers, developers, product people, marketers, founders, etc) over food and drinks while listening to golden era '90s hip-hop.
6:30pm - 6:45pm: Talk #1 from Kate Xue (Senior Frontend Software Engineer at JigSpace) on what finally made RAG click for her, and why giving AI more information isn't necessarily the same thing as giving it the right context for the task.
6:45pm - 6:55pm: Q&A with Kate - ask her about RAG, context, retrieval, or why your agent just read 400 pages of documentation and somehow became less useful.
6:55pm - 7:10pm: Short break for grabbing more food, drinks, bathroom trips.
7:10pm - 7:25pm: Talk #2 from Matthew Thomas (Senior Product Designer at Pay.com.au) on using voice to interact with AI agents, and what a future with less interface and more direct expression of intent might look like.
7:25pm - 7:35pm: Q&A with Matt - interrogate him about voice, agents, interfaces and whether we're all going to end up yelling instructions at our computers.
7:35pm - 8:00pm: More time for food, drinks and chatting about the talks, then you can go home to check on your agents.
Sponsors
The meetup is sponsored by Iterate (iterate.com.au) - a boutique recruitment partner for the Technology, Product and Design industry.
Check them out if you're looking for a new role, looking to hire, or have suddenly discovered that your current employer's "AI transformation strategy" is giving everyone Microsoft Copilot and hoping for the best.
The meetup is also sponsored by Hypermatic (hypermatic.com) - check them out if you want to save 15+ hours per week with their Premium Figma Plugins.
And a huge thanks to BuildPass (buildpass.ai) for letting us back into their offices again despite having witnessed one of these events before.
FAQ
What are we going to do at the meetup?
Feel the AGI on the first Wednesday of every month.
Hear short, practical talks from people actually building and working with AI.
See real projects, workflows and experiments instead of hypothetical use cases dreamed up by consultants.
Sit around at a cool venue in Melbourne and talk to each other about AI.
Share practical ideas and examples of what we've been experimenting with in our workflows.
Learn techniques you can steal and try at work the next morning.
Talk about the most interesting things that have happened in AI over the last few weeks.
Speed-run our collective existential crisis.
Figure out how our roles and workflows are evolving together.
You SHOULD apply if:
You are optimistic about technology and AI, and want to explore the new frontier.
You are actively building, creating, designing, automating or vibe-coding things with AI.
You are using AI coding agents like OpenAI Codex, Claude Code, Amp Code, etc.
You are experimenting with RAG, context engineering, MCPs, skills, memory, tools, sub-agents or other increasingly baroque agent infrastructure.
You use AI tools for design, development, video, images, research, content creation or actual work.
You spend unreasonable amounts of your free time experimenting with new AI tools.
You would rather see somebody's messy real workflow than another polished slide containing the words "AI-powered transformation".
You live your life a quarter mile at a time and --dangerously-skip-permissions.
DO NOT apply if:
You basically have a fake job and don't do any real work.
You are an AI doomer who wants to nuke the data centres from orbit.
You think "workflow optimization" means scheduling another recurring meeting.
Your primary objective is to corner somebody near the drinks fridge and sell them your AI SaaS.
You think AI is just hype, but haven't actually tried building anything with it.
You haven't shipped anything real in your life, but you have a lot of AI takes.
Your role exists primarily to slow things down, add friction or wait for permission.
You say "humans will always be in the loop" with the suspicious confidence of somebody who has never met an autonomous coding agent.
Wednesday, 2 September 2026
Optional doors from 5:30pm
Official start: 6:00pm
Finish: 8:00pm
BuildPass, Melbourne
Free to attend. Capacity is limited, because Melbourne contains far more AI maniacs than we originally thought.