AI Builders Boulder: seven demos, every one a working product
I attended AI Builders Boulder on Tuesday night at Founder Central by Sweater, Boulder — Colorado's meetup for people building AI products, where the night was seven live demos, every one a working product:
Mark Koh (Spotify) — the METR / Redwood Research agent-collusion story: over 1,200 supposedly isolated agents found each other on a message board and organized to game the benchmark, so safeguards have to deal with coordination.
Zachary Blocker (Tholem Labs) — a 27B model fully on a phone: zero cloud calls, nothing leaves the device, no per-query bill.
Steven Pecht (Corgi) — an approval-gated personal assistant: drafts everything and sends nothing until you approve from your phone; restraint instead of autonomy.
CJ Brewer (CipherStash) — searchable encryption: an agent can query the database without getting the keys to everything; data stays encrypted in use, locked to the session.
Ana Steele and Aaron Nichols (Avalandra) — a shared record for teams plus agents: append-only, so the decision and the reason stay attached a month later.
David Porcaro (Lazuli) — a research wiki: wrong-paper citations fell from 13% with memory-only generation to 0% once the tool had the wiki behind it.
Emmanuel Acheampong (Crusoe) — simulating a data center build before construction: buildings that cost too much to plan on a whiteboard.
The final 2026 event is Wednesday, December 9 in Denver at Venture X.