Five teams submitted five AI projects after a day of building at the Palm Desert Entrepreneurial Resource Center on September 12.
Their assignment was to take an AI agent beyond a chat window and put it somewhere people could use it: an inbox, a meeting room, a store aisle or another everyday setting.
The submissions included an email assistant that waits for approval before acting, a meeting-room agent people can correct out loud, and a stationary robot designed to help shoppers.
Palm Desert was one of 48 cities participating in AI Tinkerers’ Agents, Everywhere hackathon. The global event page listed 6,115 registered builders. Local teams submitted their projects by 5 p.m.
What the five teams submitted
The descriptions below come from the teams’ entries on the Coachella Valley showcase page. They describe the submissions, rather than independently tested products.
Clarence: an email assistant that explains its suggestions
Clarence tries to understand what a message means to its owner before recommending an action. An invoice might be a business expense, a client expense or simply something worth keeping.
The agent proposes actions such as labeling or archiving, explains its reasoning and waits for approval. When the user corrects it, that correction can be applied across similar messages.
Engineer760: an agent in the meeting room
Also called Fish Tank, this project listens to a meeting, helps keep it on pace, and captures decisions and action items on a display as they happen.
People can correct it out loud. A phone mounted outside the room serves as a live status sign.
Hey Lindsay: help running the event itself
Sat Singh built Hey Lindsay around the operational questions he faced while running the hackathon.
The voice agent was designed to draw on the event runbook, saved notes and live event state to answer questions about the schedule, team submissions, food and other organizer details.
Singh said he entered partly to go through the same build-and-submit process as the other participants. He also edits AICV News and owns SunshineFM LLC, a separate company. The project’s entry credits that company’s Audio Pilot program as Lindsay’s origin.
Homie the Home Depot Bot: a stationary retail robot
The team used its Millie Mini agent platform to build a robot a shopper could approach for help.
The intended interaction was straightforward: ask where to find a product or what might be needed for a repair, without searching an app or finding an employee.
Post-Capitalist Utopians: video production for travel creators
This team built an app intended to review a travel creator’s media and automate video production.
Its entry describes problems with Ambiguous AI that led the team toward Google Cloud. It also says 1.2 GB of Codex-generated code could not be uploaded. The team ultimately submitted planning files and a finished video.
Four of the five projects used OpenAI technology, including the Responses API, GPT-Live-1 and Codex. Engineer760 used Anthropic’s Claude API. Other tools across the submissions included CopilotKit, Trigger.dev, Supabase, Vercel, Exa and Google Cloud.
The same challenge, different cities
By the time Palm Desert opened at 10 a.m., Hong Kong had finished its event. Its chapter had built overnight on the same 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.
The public showcases provide a separate comparison: Hong Kong’s page listed 28 projects and 24 demo videos. Palm Desert’s listed five projects and two videos.
Singh said the Coachella Valley does not yet have the technical density of a mature AI builder ecosystem such as Hong Kong’s. But local teams had worked from the same brief, used many of the same tools and submitted to the same platform, he said.
That left a public record of what the local teams submitted in a day.
Who backed the event
OpenAI was the global event’s marquee sponsor. Its page also listed CopilotKit, OpenRouter, Exa, Auth0, Ambiguous AI, Trigger.dev, Mozilla and Google Cloud Run.
Locally, AI Coachella Valley—the nonprofit that publishes AICV News—co-organized and sponsored the event.
The Entrepreneurial Resource Center provided the space, food and drink, according to AICV. The center is part of Cal State San Bernardino’s Randall W. Lewis Center for Entrepreneurship and also hosts AICV workshops.
Singh runs the Coachella Valley AI Tinkerers chapter with Craig Rhodes of Structured, a Portland, Oregon, provider of digital infrastructure and managed IT services. AICV says Structured also supported the hackathon. Singh said the company planned to support additional chapter meetups over the following year.
Singh said participants spent most of the day building rather than listening to presentations.
What comes next
As of September 14, neither the Palm Desert showcase nor the global event page had named a winner.
The chapter’s next meetup was scheduled for October 28, with Structured and AICV listed as sponsors.
Singh said one hackathon does not make an ecosystem. The chapter’s questions, he said, were whether five teams could become 10, whether a single build day could become a recurring technical community, and whether local builders could become easier for founders, engineers and investors to find.
The starting point was visible: five submissions, two videos and Palm Desert on the same showcase platform as 47 other cities.
Update, October 14: Revised the headline and opening, reorganized the article for clarity and added key points. The facts, sources, archive links and September 21 correction are unchanged. Event results remain those recorded in the original reporting.