# BSOTA — Building the State of the Art

An IRL event series in San Francisco. We're a community of agentic computing
practitioners working in the open for our collective benefit.

- What: participants experiment live in small groups; each event records its
  learnings to the bsota/collective repository.
- Why: most of us spend our days working with AI alone and rarely collaborate
  IRL. BSOTA is a chance to calibrate the human element of the merge equation.
- Format: not a workshop, not a lecture. Shared vocabulary, then break into
  small groups and build, then regroup and share back.
- Venue: The Commons, San Francisco
- Hosts: Everett Kleven and Lee Flannery
- Recordings: https://www.youtube.com/@RallySF

## Vocabulary

- Technique: a repeatable, named method for accomplishing a specific objective,
  expressed as a procedure you can hand to someone else.
- Exploitation: the deliberate selection and repeated application of a technique
  that already works, to get the most out of it.

## Sessions

### State of the Art Agentic Coding Workflows

- Session: #4
- Event date: 2026-06-23
- Venue: The Commons, San Francisco
- Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2JQR1-oAhg
- Event card and recap: https://github.com/bsota/collective/blob/main/events/2026-06-23/event-card.md

The longest session so far. Skills dominated — how builders package repeatable procedure so an agent can be trusted with it — alongside review discipline, evals, and the first real comparisons across Claude Code, Codex, and Fable.

### AI Orchestration with Conductor

- Session: #2
- Event date: 2026-03-17
- Venue: The Commons, San Francisco
- Featured presenter: Daniel — Apache Airflow PMC chair
- Attendance: ~17
- Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbjQS_eqEco
- Event card and recap: https://github.com/bsota/collective/blob/main/events/2026-03-17/event-card.md

Session one covered Claude Code in the terminal; this one stepped up to the orchestration layer — several agents running in parallel on isolated branches with Conductor. Daniel presented a case study rebuilding a production platform with two developers in two months, then demoed Conductor live.

### Building the State of the Art of Claude Code

- Session: #1
- Event date: 2026-02-17
- Venue: The Commons, San Francisco
- Attendance: ~50
- Event card and recap: https://github.com/bsota/collective/blob/main/events/2026-02-17/event-card.md

The first session. Shared vocabulary for Claude Code — tools, commands, hooks, CLAUDE.md, skills, MCP, subagents, plugins — then straight into breakout groups to try techniques and report back.

### Claude Code in the Wild: 3 Builder Demos (+ Fable 5)

- Recording published: 2026-06-28 (event date not yet confirmed)
- Venue: The Commons, San Francisco
- Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqKZo6kmjrs

Three builders demo what they actually ship with, plus a first look at Fable 5. Orchestration and harness design carried the night.

### 4 Real Agentic Coding Workflows

- Recording published: 2026-06-07 (event date not yet confirmed)
- Venue: The Commons, San Francisco
- Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ChmzWNLAK0

Four builders walk through the workflow they genuinely use, end to end. Specs an agent can execute, pull requests small enough to review, and token budgets as an architectural constraint.

Event dates come from the event cards in https://github.com/bsota/collective
(events/<date>/event-card.md). A recording's YouTube upload date is not the
event date. Session #3 has no event card yet.

The community knowledge base — event recaps, references, techniques — lives at
https://github.com/bsota/collective