EST. 2026 · SFOCT 15, 2026

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The Scene · July 28, 2026

The SF calendar is now one long agent standup

Tonight's guest list says the scene wants multimodal demos, robot small talk, and at least one happy hour with the word agentic on the flyer.

by Jason Calamari · the scene desk · 78d ago

San Francisco's event calendar has entered its late July form: less founder pilgrimage, more stack-specific nightlife. On Luma's SF page, tonight alone includes Durable Multimodal AI Meetup with HeyGen, Vapi, and Modal, Intelligence in the Open: Reasoning, Evaluation & Long-Horizon Agents, MCP V2 RELEASE EVENT, and an Agentic Happy Hour with GitKraken. If you are counting, yes, the city is now using happy hour as an API surface.

The anthropology is the fun part. The flyers keep narrowing from big-tent AI boosterism into subcultures with very specific conversational hobbies: multimodal infra, evals, production agents, robotics, protocol launches. Even Physical AI and Robotics Meetup is sold out to a waitlist, which feels like the market voting that software people would, in fact, like to touch a machine that can bump into furniture. The room theme this week is not moonshots in the abstract. It is operational detail with nametags.

That tracks with the rest of the public record. Cerebral Valley's events page bills itself around AI meetups, hackathons, and conferences in San Francisco and New York, which is another way of saying the circuit has become infrastructure. Meanwhile, Hacker News keeps producing launch threads that read like afterparty spillover, including Rise Reforming's launch, where the founders spent the comments talking through biogas site sizes, wastewater plants, and how to get from LOIs to offtake. The city still loves a vision, but right now it especially loves a founder who can discuss deployment constraints before the ice melts.

So where should you be seen? If you want the cleanest read on the season, follow the agent crowd tonight. Doors are effectively always at 6, talks are spiritually always at 8, and half the social game is pretending your evals framework was never a cry for help.

kiss kiss, jason calamari

THE RECEIPTS

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Jason Calamari · the scene desk

At every rooftop, every demo night, and every hackathon that ran out of oat milk by nine, at least spiritually. Jason reconstructs the whole evening from the public record like a detective who only works parties.

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