AI programming tools demo meetup, Madison College Truax, Thurs Jan 29 @ 6pm
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Erik Paulson
Jan 20, 2026, 12:31:42 PMJan 20
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Hi all -
A couple of the local meetups are doing a joint session next week and I thought it might be of interest to folks:
Join us for a special hands-on “AI Coding Tools Demo Night” on Thursday, January 29th, 2026 at 6:00pm, hosted at the Madison College Truax campus. Over the course of two hours, 3 presenters will each use a different AI-assisted coding tool like Copilot, Cursor, Claude Code, Gemini, Codex, etc to build the same small app from scratch in about 20 minutes each, from first prompt all the way through deployment. This is a great chance to see how these tools actually behave in real time and to ask questions about how people use them: prompting strategies, workflow tips, costs, subscription tradeoffs, and anything else you’re curious about. It’s not a competition, just a guided, practical way to learn what these tools can do.
We'll be in the Madison College Truax Main Building, at 1701 Wright Street. We'll be in the conference hall, which near the cafeteria. The room number is D1630, breakout rooms B and C, and is labeled as '21' on this map: https://madisoncollege.edu/files/media-document/2023-12/truax-first-floor.pdf
We recommend parking in the visitor lot, which can be accessed via Hoffman Street. The access code to the visitor lot will be #0146. If the lot is full, you can use the surrounding student stalls. There is also metered parking at the Anderson St entrance, near the meeting room. The Truax Building is also on the "A" Line of the Bus Rapid Transit with a stop right in front of the building, if you want to skip the driving and parking.
This will be a joint session of the MadAI Meetup and the Civic Hacking Madison Meetup, and we hope to make it a friendly, low-pressure, high-learning evening. If you’re a software developer who’s never touched an AI coding tool before, this is a perfect on-ramp—you’ll see multiple real workflows side-by-side, get a feel for how these assistants “think,” and a chance to see what you think is worth paying for (and what isn’t). And if you’re already using these tools daily, this is a chance to see how other developers structure prompts, debug with an agent, and collaborate with these models in practice. No matter your level of experience, you’ll come away with new ideas, new techniques, and a clearer sense of what these tools can add to your own development style. We’d love to see you there!
We'll be in the Madison College Truax Main Building, at 1701 Wright Street. We'll be in the conference hall, which near the cafeteria. The room number is D1630, breakout rooms B and C, and is labeled as '21' on this map: https://madisoncollege.edu/files/media-document/2023-12/truax-first-floor.pdf
We recommend parking in the visitor lot, which can be accessed via Hoffman Street. The access code to the visitor lot will be #0146. If the lot is full, you can use the surrounding student stalls. There is also metered parking at the Anderson St entrance, near the meeting room. The Truax Building is also on the "A" Line of the Bus Rapid Transit with a stop right in front of the building, if you want to skip the driving and parking.
This will be a joint session of the MadAI Meetup and the Civic Hacking Madison Meetup, and we hope to make it a friendly, low-pressure, high-learning evening. If you’re a software developer who’s never touched an AI coding tool before, this is a perfect on-ramp—you’ll see multiple real workflows side-by-side, get a feel for how these assistants “think,” and a chance to see what you think is worth paying for (and what isn’t). And if you’re already using these tools daily, this is a chance to see how other developers structure prompts, debug with an agent, and collaborate with these models in practice. No matter your level of experience, you’ll come away with new ideas, new techniques, and a clearer sense of what these tools can add to your own development style. We’d love to see you there!
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