Cerebral Valley – Week of April 20th 🗓

The Built with Opus 4.7 Hackathon is kicking off soon! Plus, NatSec 3.0 is coming up along with other AI events, jobs, and more...

April 20, 2026

Claude Code Hackathon 2.0

We’re blown away by the community’s response to our Built with Opus 4.7 - a Claude Code hackathon.

We’re sifting through a record number of applicants - if you applied to the event, you’ll be hearing back very soon!

This second Claude Code virtual hackathon is going to be epic. We also have some exciting announcements coming - follow our X to stay posted

CV Events


🎖️ National Security Hackathon (by Army xTech) Top Silicon Valley builders tackle national security challenges at the 3rd annual hackathon. The US Army is an official partner, with mentors and judges from Palantir, OpenAI, Deloitte, and government and military leaders. Problem sets span command & control, cybersecurity, drones, and edge compute. Approval required.

📍 Sat–Sun, May 2–3 | 4:00 PM – 11:00 PM PDT | San Francisco, CA 🔗 Register here

You Might’ve Missed

  • Composing a search engine — @ExaAILabs dives into the code-level abstractions they've built to develop search infrastructure that's both performant and a joy to work with. A search engine has many moving parts — and they constantly change with scale of index and traffic. Full technical blog post linked.

  • dflash-mlx: speculative decoding on Apple Silicon — @aryagm01 ports DFlash speculative decoding to Apple Silicon. Qwen3-4B at 186 tok/s on a MacBook — 4.6x faster than plain MLX-LM. Exact greedy decoding: output matches plain target decoding perfectly.

CV Spotlight: Nebius Token Factory

From LLM to production system, in one platform

Capture live traffic, fine-tune and optimize, then deploy your own checkpoints to dedicated GPU endpoints. Choose hardware, set scaling limits, and select region. Stable latency, predictable cost, clear data residency.

From LLM to production system, in one platform

🔗 Learn more here


Open Jobs

Looking to hire the best talent? Reach out to [email protected] for job placement inquiries.

Data Engineer at AI Presentation Automation Company (SF)

- Building: Presentation generation, creation, and automation software

- About: Series B unicorn • Profitable with >$100m ARR • $800m+ raised

- Ideal candidate: 4+ years experience in software and data engineering • Strong proficiency in Typescript, LLMs in development, and building AI agents • Senior engineer that can jump into new projects with no handholding

Software Engineer at Computational Photography Startup (Remote)

- Building: Photo upscaling and generation for real estate & spatial photography

- About: Fully bootstrapped with >8 figures ARR • Small, distributed, tight-knit team • Solving cutting-edge problems in photography and spatial understanding • Processing thousands of pictures per day on industrial GPU infrastructure

- Ideal candidate: Experience does not matter, but demonstrated aptitude in game development or diffusion models are a huge plus • Clear communicators that value shipping > prestige • Repeat hackathon winners • Merging code into prod on day one

AI Engineer at Construction Automation Startup (SF)

- Building: AI agents for construction, “Harvey for real estate development”

- About: Backed by CEO of Blackstone & others • Harvard-founded • Clients include Tishman Speyer & premier real estate firms • Solving frontier geospatial AI problems

- Ideal candidate: Experience building production-ready agents • Python or typescript expertise • Strong preference for ex-founders or ex-founding engineers

If you’re interested in the above roles, please email [email protected] with your LinkedIn, resume, and why you think you’re the best fit. We’ll be in touch if there’s a match.

Events List

A curated list of upcoming AI events (view all events).

Featured in April:

🗓️ Saturday, May 2nd
📍 London, UK

Build in a day. Shape the future of AI Agents. Showcase on a global stage. This isn't just a one-day sprint — it's an accelerator. Build AI agents that learn, adapt, and evolve autonomously, then demo your project LIVE at MongoDB.local London on May 7th. Judged by MongoDB's Field CTO, a UN Women AI advisor, and top venture partners. £15,000 in prizes and exclusive residencies. Fully in-person, max team size of four. Approval required.

🗓️ Sat–Sun, May 16–17
📍 Notion HQ, San Francisco, CA

Join the Notion team for two days of building on their new Developer Platform. Build with primitives that let you sync any data source into Notion, give your agent any tool, and trigger workflows from anywhere. No servers, no infra — just a CLI and your ideas. Whether you've been building integrations for years or you're writing your first Worker, this hackathon is designed to get you shipping. Sponsored by Anthropic, OpenAI, and Vercel.

🗓️ Thursday, May 7th
📍 AWS Builder Loft, San Francisco CA

Think your AI prompts write secure code? Prove it. Clash of Prompts is a first-of-its-kind live tournament where developers go head-to-head, crafting prompts scored in real time on code security, agent work, and token efficiency. Whether you compete or spectate, you'll walk away with sharper instincts for writing prompts that produce secure, production-ready code — plus food, drinks, and retro games. Compete in person at the AWS Builder Loft SF on May 7 or join the online tournament. Over $23,500 in prizes up for grabs, hosted by Symbiotic Security.

🗓️ Wednesday, April 22nd
📍 Bengaluru, Karnataka, India

For everyone building in the Built with Opus 4.7 Claude Code hackathon, Zo House is your physical home in Bangalore for the weekend. ​Drop in on this week, any days. Bring your laptop. We've got fast wifi, quiet desks, loud sofas, and a full crew of builders working in the same room.

🗓️ Monday April 20th
📍 Shack15, San Francisco, CA

Beltic x Shack15 host a private dinner on identity and trust in the agentic economy. Founders, investors, and enterprise leaders across AI, fintech, and infrastructure discuss how trust evolves as systems move from human-driven to agent-driven. Fireside speakers include Kevin Leffew (x402, Coinbase — an open protocol for autonomous agent payments over HTTP), Jørn Lyseggen (Founder at Shack15 and BKEY, 20 years in identity), and Dazza Greenwood (CodeX, Stanford Law & MIT — AI governance and accountability). Space limited, approval-based.

🗓️ Saturday, April 25th
📍 Plug and Play Tech Center, Sunnyvale, California

​12 hours. 2 tracks. Bay Area.

​Small businesses are the backbone of our communities — and they're being left behind by the agentic AI wave. We're here to change that.

​Join us for Plug & Play Foundation's first-ever hackathon, where builders, designers, and problem-solvers come together to create real tools for real businesses.

🗓️ May 12-14th
📍 Mariott Marquis, San Francisco CA

AI Council is the IKYK technical conference for builders in AI. Hear from the co-inventor of ChatGPT. Creator of DuckDB. Creator of Codex. 1,500+ engineers. 10 tracks. Zero hype. Join teams from OpenAI, Anthropic, Snowflake, Databricks, Hugging Face, Vercel, and 100+ more.

Register

🗓️ Tuesday, May 5th
📍 Los Angeles, California

We're opening the HQ for AI in SoCal. Join us at our brand new offices in the heart of the LA Arts District for a private evening of great drinks, food and conversation with other AI builders.

To eat, we'll be serving delicious Mexican food, margs and mixed drinks from Damian - it's only right, it's Cinco De Mayo.

We'll also have some swanky gifts to give away via a raffle.

So join us at our brand new space where AI builders meet - no presentations, just a great atmosphere, people and food.

​About Us: ZeroClick is building the Ads Platform for AI. Backed by 55M in funding from top VCs, we're deeply involved in building the 'agentic web', and are excited to share more in person.

🗓️ Friday, May 1st
📍 San Francisco, CA

Video is becoming the richest interface in computing and the tooling is finally catching up. Top developers, creatives, and builders come together for a fast-paced hackathon exploring what's possible with real-time video, generative media, and multimodal systems. Hands-on access to APIs from fal, Overshoot, and Mux, with teams hacking for 4 hours then demoing live. Hosted by a16z. Approval required.

This Week in SF:

🗓️ Wednesday, April 22nd 📍 Mid-Market, San Francisco, CA

AI builders put their products to the test — live, with real users. No demos, no slides. Bring your product (side project or venture-backed), set up a laptop, and watch people try to break it. Hosted by Novita AI.

🗓️ Thursday, April 23rd. 📍 Standard Deviant Brewing, San Francisco, CA

The best startup operators in the world gather monthly — this time going deep on AGI (what's real vs hype), AI in war and geopolitics, and what happens when agents stop being tools and start acting like teammates. Hosted by Adam Spector (4x founder). Approval required.

🗓️ Saturday, April 25th
📍 Mission District, San Francisco, CA

Cognee and Pebblebed VC host a hands-on hackathon where you build AI agents that learn from experience. Use Cognee's open-source memory engine to equip remote agents with persistent memory, skill reuse, and self-improvement — all running in the cloud. $1,500+ in cash prizes.

This Week in NYC:

🗓️ Monday, April 20th 📍New York, NY

Bring your laptop and get ready to ship.

​​Join us for an exclusive builder night celebrating the launch of Vercel Workflows: the foundation for building durable, production-ready AI agents in TypeScript.

​​You'll hear from real teams using Vercel Workflows, build an agent yourself, and deploy it to production alongside the Vercel engineers who built the product.

🗓️ Tuesday, April 21st 📍 New York, NY

After a packed April 7 meetup, NYC Voice AI builders are back — this time focused on multi-modal voice and real-time conversation design. Covers turn-taking, interruptions, and building conversational experiences that actually work. Hosted by Hermes and Agora with fireside chat, demos, and complimentary drinks.

🗓️ Thursday, April 23rd 📍 Domino Offices, Brooklyn, NY

NYC AI Demos is back. April's edition is themed around the AI Startup Stack — spotlighting the tools, infrastructure, and frameworks founders are actually using to build and scale. Real products, candid conversations, and networking at The Refinery in Domino. Presented by Pensar. Approval required.

Planning an upcoming event? Submit an event to our AI Event Feature.

Final Note…

You’ve reached the end of our weekly Cerebral Valley newsletter.

Sponsors: If you would like to promote a launch, event or hiring call to our community of AI founders, enterprises and investors, chat with our profile.