On Saturday morning, builders walked into the Palm Desert Entrepreneurial Resource Center with one assignment: get an AI agent out of the chat window and into the places people actually work.
By 5 p.m., five teams had submitted five projects.
The September 12 event was the Coachella Valley edition of Agents, Everywhere, a global hackathon organized by AI Tinkerers. Palm Desert was one of 48 participating cities, alongside a global field of 6,115 registered builders, by the count on AI Tinkerers’ page for the event.
The brief: build an agent that could live somewhere more useful than a chat box, in email, a browser, a meeting room, a store aisle, a voice interface, a workplace tool or another everyday environment.
In Palm Desert, 25 people registered, according to the chapter’s registration page.
OpenAI was the marquee sponsor of the global event. CopilotKit, OpenRouter, Exa, Auth0, Ambiguous AI, Trigger.dev, Mozilla and Google Cloud Run were also listed as sponsors.
Locally, AI Coachella Valley, the nonprofit that publishes AICV News, co-organized and sponsored the day. The Entrepreneurial Resource Center itself, part of the Randall W. Lewis Center for Entrepreneurship at Cal State San Bernardino and the venue for AICV’s workshops, was a local sponsor too, providing the space and the food and drink, AICV says. AICV founder Sat Singh runs the Coachella Valley chapter with Craig Rhodes of Structured, a Portland, Oregon, provider of digital infrastructure and managed IT services, which AICV says also supported the event. Singh says Structured plans to support additional chapter meetups over the next year.
The room spent most of Saturday doing exactly what the hackathon asked, Singh says: building.
the five projects
The five local submissions, in each team’s own description on the chapter’s showcase page:
Clarence was built around email. Instead of applying simple inbox rules, the agent tries to understand what a message means to its owner before suggesting what to do with it. An invoice, for example, might be a business expense, a client expense or simply something worth keeping. Clarence proposes actions such as labeling or archiving, explains why, and waits for approval. If the user corrects it, the same correction can be applied across similar messages.
Engineer760, also called Fish Tank, moved the agent into a meeting room. It listens to the conversation, keeps the meeting on pace, captures decisions and action items, and displays them in the room as they happen. If it gets something wrong, people can correct it out loud. A phone mounted outside the room acts as a live status sign.
Hey Lindsay was built by Singh for a problem he was experiencing in real time: running the hackathon itself. The voice agent was designed to answer operational questions from the event runbook, saved notes and live event state: what happens next, which teams still need to submit, what is happening with food and other organizer details. Singh told AICV News he entered the project partly because he wanted to go through the same build-and-submit process as everyone else in the room. Singh also edits this site and owns SunshineFM LLC, a separate company, whose Audio Pilot program the entry credits as Lindsay’s origin.
Homie the Home Depot Bot turned the team’s Millie Mini agent platform into a stationary retail robot. A shopper could walk up, ask where to find a product or what they might need to fix a problem, and get an answer without searching through an app or finding an employee.
Post-Capitalist Utopians tackled the travel-influencer production process, building an app intended to review a creator’s media and automate the video production. The team wrote that problems with Ambiguous AI pushed them toward Google Cloud, and that 1.2 GB of Codex-generated code could not be uploaded. They ultimately submitted planning files and a finished video.
Four of the five Palm Desert projects used OpenAI technology in some form, including the Responses API, GPT-Live-1 and Codex. Engineer760 used Anthropic’s Claude API. Other tools used across the teams included CopilotKit, Trigger.dev, Supabase, Vercel, Exa and Google Cloud.
palm desert was building while hong kong was already done
A global hackathon puts every city’s showcase on the same platform.
By the time Palm Desert opened its doors at 10 a.m., Hong Kong had already finished. Its AI Tinkerers chapter had built overnight on the same global brief and posted a recap video before the Palm Desert event was fully underway.
Hong Kong’s organizers said 67 builders across 30 teams “created and shipped 25 working AI agent prototypes” in five hours at Cyberport, supported by more than HK$200,000 in local prizes, credits and mentorship. AICV News has not independently verified those claims.
What can be seen directly is the public showcase. Hong Kong’s page lists 28 projects and 25 demo videos. Palm Desert’s lists five projects and two videos.
Singh, who co-organized the Palm Desert event, told AICV News that Palm Desert is not Hong Kong, and that the Coachella Valley does not yet have the technical density of a mature AI builder ecosystem. But for one Saturday, he said, local teams worked from the same brief, used many of the same tools and submitted to the same global platform, and that gives the region something it did not have before: a visible, public record of what local builders can produce in a day.
what happens next
Neither the Palm Desert showcase nor the global page had named a winner as of September 14.
The Coachella Valley chapter’s next meetup is scheduled for October 28, with Structured and AICV listed as sponsors.
One hackathon does not make an ecosystem, Singh says. The questions the chapter is now asking, he says, are whether five teams can become 10, whether one build day can become a recurring technical community, and whether the Coachella Valley can turn a handful of local builders into something dense enough that the next founder, engineer or investor knows where to find them.
For now, the public record is the showcase page: five projects, two videos, and Palm Desert listed among the 48.