what this is
The Gradient Ascent is a monthly community of practice for builders who are past the hello-world phase and shipping real things with AI.
This is for developers, makers, indie hackers, and technical founders who are actively building with AI tools — not just reading about them. The room is not a lecture series and not a pitch night. It’s people showing each other the actual prompt, the eval that broke, the integration that half-worked and why. Experience levels vary; what’s constant is that everyone is building something. Bring your rough edges. Failure is content.
a format that rotates
We meet monthly and rotate the format so it never gets stale. The room is the point; when subscriber interest supports it, we’ll also open a remote session and email the link.
- Show & Tell
- members demo current work, 10 minutes each
- Build Night
- hands-on collaborative session, bring a laptop
- Deep Dive
- one focused technical topic, presenter-led with discussion
- Postmortem & Trends
- what shipped, what failed, what's coming
logistics
- In person, with a remote option when enough subscribers vote for it
- Free, no membership fee, no registration wall
- Monthly, on the fourth Saturday of the month
- 1:00–2:00 PM Central
- Located in the Kansas City metro