Falling into Curiosity

In recent months, everything is changing. New foundational models are coming out everywhere like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and DeepSeek, making it complicated to keep track. There are new products that reach millions of users in just a few months like Cursor and Lovable. There are new frameworks for making agents that you have to try all the time. Keeping up is complicated.

Many news to read every day, from AI replacing us all and leaving us jobless to AI being the solution for everything and us living in a utopia. Going on social media only increases this amount of hype and doom.

In such dynamic moments it's easy to fall into cynicism and believe everything is hype to ignore. It's easy to fall into fatigue and close ourselves off to everything that's happening. Fortunately, it's also easy to fall into curiosity and decide to try learning a little bit every day. Much depends on how we fare along the way.

Fortunately, we've been doing hackathons that have helped me fall into curiosity and I'm very grateful to the Release Before Ready community for all the good vibes and energy they've filled us with. I hope to give back some of that good energy. RbR has grown quite a bit since last October and is starting to exist in two ways.

First, there are the hackathons. There are already dates announced on the site for the rest of the year, they'll happen from now until the end of the year mainly in Mexico City, with a date in September in Guadalajara and we just announced a new date in Bogotá in August. It's a very simple hackathon, we all come to create something for 12 hours that motivates us to exist, there are no judges, no prizes. Just our curiosity and stubbornness pushing us to create and share with other attendees.

In addition to what happens at events, attendees have been gathering in a WhatsApp group that we first used to organize ourselves on event day. Little by little we stayed in the channel sharing what we're learning, and today it has matured into a channel where interesting news is shared every day, questions are asked and people help each other know what's happening in the tech world these days.

Thanks to the community, we've managed to filter out much of the noise and focus on relevant tools that help us create digital products. In the first hackathon we had many people making RAGs because it was the most interesting way to tackle the problem that LLMs lacked information about our projects. By Guadalajara, there were already several playing with MCPs to give much more power to apps like Cursor or Claude. Some were adding MCPs to their apps like Terapify and Wallavi. As a community we filter out much of the noise to find interesting things to build and share how we keep track of protocols and papers being published with lots of information.

In hackathons we've seen the apps that attendees create day by day grow. Seeing what members create gives you a clear idea of what you can create for the problems you have in mind. You can even build on what they create to make your own products. A very interesting case is Neuraan, who in the first hackathon was just starting to make their SaaS for creating chatbots and today it's a robust product. By the last one there was already a demo from Rox showing how he created a chatbot with Neuraan after failing to do it from scratch. It was a great demo and great validation of what Mario and Israel are creating.

In some hackathons we've had prior Zoom talks with people showing the products they're creating. A special case is Dapta where Nico has shown us what he's built for making workflows and agents. We've seen some demos from people like Erik Rivera showing how he created a product for elderly people using Dapta. It will be nice to visit Colombia and share an RbR with Nico.

In the news everything can seem like noise. Many new products come out all the time that are worth trying. Windsurf has some hype after the acquisition by OpenAI and seems to have the same punch as Cursor. Something interesting is that in the RbR community recently Julia organized a survey to verify which is used more and it turns out that Cursor is the most used by far and the one growing in the community is Claude Code after Jeduan showed us a bit how to use it in the last hackathon. It seems Claude Code has so much power that we all started trying to play with it. Some have tried Gemini CLI and shared their experience, it still seems to be missing something to have the power that Claude has in CLI.

Being able to learn from others to understand which model and app is good has made the learning curve easier. Being able to share how we do things, how we use them, helps us a lot to filter the noise. It helps us nourish ourselves from the community and be able to focus on taking advantage of everything that's emerging to create. Being able to see someone use a tool is the best way to learn how to take advantage of it.

All this makes this community growing to be a nice place on the internet in addition to an event that happens every month. I'd like to thank all the hackathon attendees for putting in some good vibes, it's been a great first half of the year and the second half of the year excites me so much along with all the RbR members.

If this way of learning, nourishing your curiosity and creating motivates and resonates with you, we invite you to join the community and attend the hackathon we'll have on July 12th at Flexoffices in Juárez and help us continue creating events where we all create, all learn new things and create new digital products that make this world a better place.