About

# what this is

The Gradient Ascent is a monthly community of practice for people using AI to make things they couldn’t otherwise make: skills, agents, custom workflows, images, video, music, software. Not a class. Not a meetup with a vendor pitch. A room full of people who actually build, comparing notes once a month.

The name is the optimization algorithm. Climbing toward better, one step at a time. Most months we discover the gradient was pointing in a slightly different direction than we thought.

# who it’s for

We filter by seriousness, not skill level. If you are past “write me a poem” and into “I have a thing I want this to do, and I’m going to make it do that thing,” you are the right person. Beginners ship plenty of great work; tourists do not. We mind the difference.

# why I’m doing this

I’m a DevOps / SRE engineer. I’ve spent the last while building agents, custom Claude setups, and AI-glued workflows for my own work — and the field has moved faster than any of my usual rooms could keep up with.

Most of what I’ve learned, I learned by figuring it out on my own — mostly by using AI to learn about AI. YouTube tutorials, for me, kept turning into a distraction from the actual loop of trying something, watching it fail, and asking the model what I missed.

So: a room. Once a month. People who similarly figured this stuff out on their own, in the same room, comparing what their gradient pointed them at. No vendor pitches.

Kansas City has an underrated builder scene and no group like this yet. I live here, I want to anchor a community I can show up to, and starting it where I am is the most honest version of that. If this sounds like the room you’d want to be in, get on the list.

# what a meeting looks like

Hybrid. In person somewhere in Kansas City, plus a remote link for everyone else. Roughly an hour and a half. The shape:

• // 10 min — arrivals, chat, who-are-you
• // 50 min — 3–5 short demos from members; questions encouraged
• // 30 min — open table: stuck on something, looking for a collaborator, sharing a useful technique
• // rest — people stay and talk, or peel off

Demos are show-and-tell, not pitches. If the thing crashes during the demo, that’s actually the best kind. We learn more from the real edges than the polished surface.

# who runs it

Taylor Finklea organizes. Email taylor@finklea.dev with anything you’d say in person.

# the rules

Read the code of conduct. It is short.