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Seven builders showed what they're working on at Demo Day S8 at SQ Collective on Friday 2 October. This time around, we split them into three groups: agent infrastructure, the personal layer, and applications. If you prefer videos, watch the full session on youtube here. Contents Agent infrastructure 1. Lewis Tham, Unbrowse: lets AI agents use websites that have no API 2. Dima, agentscoworking.com: a shared room where people and their AI agents work toward one goal The person

Meng To opens Design Jam S1 tired of the same AI design. Creative engineering, vocabulary as prompts, and a ten thousand dollar craft.

Philipp Holke on The Stage: SaaS are tools not solutions, AGI principles, and owning native tools for agent-native work.

Lucian Grey asks what makes media worth caring about when AI makes production abundant. The answer starts with a message, then a character called Willy.

“We're going to go into the future today,” Jeremy said to a room of business folks and engineers after returning from San Francisco. He started not with a product pitch, but with a reference to a 2024 essay, “Situational Awareness.” The essay’s first line then was a prediction: “We don’t have hardware AGI yet, unfortunately.” Two years later, Jeremy’s dispatch from the frontier was a status update on that prediction, a report on where the curve is heading from the labs that a

Joshua Woo did not come to Friday to talk like the lawyer in the room. Privacy is the sale, not the chore.

Meng, a designer who has shipped five apps in two years using AI, started his demo with a direct look at the results. On the screen was a vibrant, interactive 3D world, procedurally generated by an AI that had worked for two hours straight. The entire scene, full of graphs and butterflies that react to the cursor, was less than one megabyte. This, he explained, is what is possible. But he sees a huge problem in the current AI landscape. “A lot of people don't realize that the

A developer at a recent SQ Collective demo day, Son, presented a compiler project with a straightforward demonstration. On the screen was a code sample written in a language that looked like TypeScript. He explained that his toolchain could take this single source and go in two completely different directions. One path transpiled it into normal JavaScript, runnable in any web browser. The other path was more direct. It compiled the code into C, which then became a native bina

Markus, co-founder of a new financial advisory app, opened his talk with a direct question for the room of builders. "Who of you have a portfolio of stocks that you have invested or ETFs?" The question grounded the room in practical stakes. His company is tackling the challenge of providing regulated investment advice for individual stocks, a space where trust is non-negotiable. He gave an example of a user with a portfolio of five stocks. The app would provide advice on each

Ben from Lightsprint started his Demo Day session with a quick poll of the room. "Who's an engineer," he asked, then, "who's a product manager, or ops." The question went straight to the heart of the friction he wants to resolve. As a former product manager himself, Ben knew the pain of being blocked. A customer request is clear, but the engineering team pushes back. "Sometimes this idea doesn't make sense, it's not technically feasible," he recalled hearing. "It's going to t

Brent started his demo with a question for the room of builders. "How many people have I coded an iOS app? Raise your hand." "Quite a few. Quite a few. Cool," he said, reading the room. The setting was informal, a live look at a project he described as "very raw" and just a couple of weeks old. He didn't even have a name for it yet. This was a look at a new tool, and he set the room's expectations with a builder's candor. "I'm going to give it a live demonstration. And it's p

The first slide on screen was not a market forecast or a complex architectural diagram, but a simple picture of a dog. “That is my dog,” Derek said. “This is going to be a very dog-focused presentation.” This set the stage for a talk grounded not in abstract trends, but in a tangible problem Derek chose to solve for a small business he knew firsthand: the doggy daycare his own puppy loves. Derek, who comes from a background in big tech and video games, recently started a solo

Arjun began his demo by polling the builders in the room, asking how many were running an agent product in production. "That's lesser than expected," he remarked. This poll served as the entry point to his core prediction: the way agents are built is about to fundamentally change. From Manual Tuning to Meta-Artistry The common loop for agent development involves running the agent, evaluating its performance, and manually tuning its logic or prompts. Arjun’s talk suggested thi

"This is obviously Raza and myself and there's a dwarf," Wondo began, standing beside his colleague Raza at a recent SQ Collective Coworking Friday. "And us, [we] love and care a lot about crafts." For the next hour, Wondo and Raza of GovTech Singapore, currently deployed to the Ministry of Education (MOE), would act as builders forging new tools. Their talk was not a high-level manifesto, but a practical, demo-led session on how they are taking back control of their work as

“When we prepared this presentation, we got like 50 slides and we had to cut,” Dima said. The journey started when he was at a 500-person tech company pushing to implement AI, but with no obvious results. No more deals, no more revenue. He spent about two months talking to people, from senior managers to individual contributors, to figure out why. A pattern emerged. Senior leaders would tell their teams to "use AI," but they didn't use any agents themselves. They didn't see h

“I ran an update on my demo and I broke it,” John said. “I told my AI agents to go fix it, but I don’t know if it’s fully fixed.” Michael had just introduced him, noting this talk was a major update to his last visit in January. Now, John was about to demo Hachi, his company’s AI employee, live over WhatsApp. He explained that the system waits 20 seconds to process messages, a small accommodation for how people actually talk: in short bursts. As he spoke, a new message appear

“I hope that this topic is not very dry,” Nuri, an independent consultant on responsible AI, said to the room on a Friday afternoon. A few laughs. She was about to talk about governance, but her real topic was trust. With AI moving from decision support to conversational assistants and now to autonomous agents, a new question fills the room: when an agent makes a mistake, who is responsible? For builders, Nuri’s message was simple: responsible AI is not a compliance checkbox.

Hanyi, a dispute lawyer with ten years of experience, started with the words “AI LAWYER” on the screen. Then they blinked out. “That’s my crisis,” he joked. For a lawyer, the term suggests replacement, an existential threat that he said keeps him and his batchmates awake at night. On this Friday afternoon, a senior dispute lawyer and a computer science undergraduate are asking the same fundamental question about their craft. Hanyi’s answer isn’t to fight the technology. It’s

Haodan's explorations into this topic started with a question from a lead data scientist inside SAP, someone who should have had the least fear. He asked the visiting CAIO, “how can we stay on top in the age of AI?” That question from someone “working at the frontier” surprised Hao Dan, Lead Product Manager for one of SAP’s most successful AI products. In this week's session of The Stage, Haodan shared her thoughts on what she thinks is the recipe for differentiation in the

Six months. That is usually how long it takes. You build a clean demo. You walk the stakeholders through it. They are impressed. You leave the room with momentum and a follow-up meeting scheduled. Six months later, the product sits untouched. Not because it broke. Because nobody trusted it enough to keep using it. Bhavna opened her talk at Coworking Friday this way, and I recognised the room in her description. Most of us had watched this happen. Several of us from inside it.