AI Tinkerers Chicago: a hands‑on AI engineering meetup in Chicago.

AI Tinkerers Chicago is a community of active AI engineers, researchers and technical founders who meet in Chicago to build, experiment and ship generative‑AI systems. The group runs a monthly, hands‑on meetup that forbids slide decks and instead requires presenters to show working code, messy experiments or architectural walkthroughs. The June 9, 2026 event featured a live demo call‑out and a special talk from Benjamin Meeder, CTO and co‑founder of Coinflow, who shared his experience building resilient payment‑rail infrastructure that connects traditional banking with stablecoins. Partners include the UChicago Graham School, which brings rigorous Socratic‑style learning to the technical community, and Coinflow, a leader in instant global settlement. Attendance is manually screened to keep the room full of practitioners who can dive into implementation details; the space is limited and often has a wait‑list. The community values code‑forward demos that explain how a specific technical challenge was solved, what could be reused or avoided, and how the solution can be evaluated or controlled.