Byte Night September: AI Agents, Game Dev, and Career Conversations

by Alamo Tech Collective community, meetups 18 attendees

Friday night’s Byte Night brought together roughly 18 people for our regular meetup. Here’s a summary of the main discussions and topics that came up.

New Faces and Introductions

Several first-time attendees joined us, including:

  • An admin for Coupa (cloud-based invoicing) at a medical school
  • Someone doing IT for the military at Lackland
  • A recent arrival who’d been working remotely from Tel Aviv, Brazil, the Bahamas, Key West, and other locations before settling in San Antonio

Technical Discussions

AI and Development Tools

A significant portion of the evening focused on AI agents and development workflows:

  • Using Claude and Playwright together for automation
  • Multi-agent systems (MAS) for complex development tasks
  • The FAR filter approach for evaluating AI output (Factual, Actionable, Relevant)
  • Concerns about security in AI-generated code
  • Discussion about AI prompt engineering and “reverse prompting” techniques

Game Development

Multiple conversations about game engines and development:

  • Building simple game engines with OpenGL and Vulkan
  • Discussion of procedural generation using Perlin noise
  • A gravity-based mobile game called “Graviton” that one member had published
  • Unity’s pricing changes and their impact on indie developers
  • The challenges of maintaining mobile games across Android updates

Other Technical Topics

  • Distributed tracing challenges and solutions
  • Custom mechanical keyboards, including one with only 30 keys using layers
  • NoSQL vs SQL database choices
  • An idea for an operating system without folders (using tags instead)
  • QA automation terminology and best practices
  • Testing strategies (TDD vs implementation-first approaches)

Career and Business Discussions

  • Job searching in San Antonio’s tech market
  • The prevalence of government and banking jobs requiring security clearances
  • Comparisons between San Antonio and Austin tech scenes
  • The challenges of running a software agency

Community Updates

  • Taco Tuesday Open Source Builder Night continues every other Tuesday
  • Coffee & Code this Sunday (7-11am) had 14 RSVPs, up from the usual 6
  • Plans for an AI-assisted coding workshop later in the month
  • Discussion about using AI agents to guide development rather than writing all code directly

Notable Quotes and Moments

  • “I’ve been to meetups in Austin and this is so much more chill”
  • Someone describing the scene as potential “fight club with keyboards”
  • One attendee mentioned they’ve been to other meetups in San Antonio and this is the only one where real technical conversations happen
  • Discussion about the eternal struggle of naming variables
  • A member’s approach to incremental development: “finish a piece, build it, see if it works, and then push it out”
  • As one attendee noted while leaving: “A lot of smart minds in the building”