Build Mode
Bring your laptop. Build your own claw.
Agents are no longer just chat windows. They call tools, run code, touch workflows, use skills, hit MCP servers, and sometimes break in ways worth learning from.
The Builders Zone is where you build them live, compare setups, demo weird prototypes, and leave with something running.
Some of It Started Here
Peter Steinberger spoke at WeAreDevelopers in 2017 — about keeping a single open-source project sustainable. Eight years and one PSPDFKit exit later, he came back with OpenClaw: the local-first agent that ate the GitHub trending page in February 2026 and got him hired by OpenAI two weeks after the rebrand. The long tail of what gets built at this event is wider than any keynote will ever cover. We don't know who's in the audience this year doing the same. That is the point of the Builders Zone.
What You Can Build Here
A loose menu of the kinds of things people show up to build at the event. Bring whatever you're already working on — or pick something off this list and start fresh on the floor.
Wire up an agent that does something real — searches your codebase, drafts a PR, drives a workflow, talks to your internal tools. OpenClaw-inspired builds, NanoClaw forks, Claude Agent SDK experiments, or your own thing entirely. Useful or weird, both welcome.
Set up an AI-assisted coding workflow you'd actually use on Monday — agentic IDEs and coding agents (Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot, and the rest), evals, review loops, the lot.
Stand up an MCP server that exposes one of your systems to a coding agent, or hook into someone else's. Small, sharp integrations beat slideware.
The unsexy 80% — `SKILL.md` files, `~/.claude` configs, `.cursor` rules, prompts, evals, the slash-commands you keep retyping. Make them portable, share them, steal someone else's, leave with a setup that's actually yours.
Build the boring parts that make agents useful: permissions, allowlists, test cases, evals, rollback paths, logging, and sandboxes. The claw that can do everything is less interesting than the claw you can actually trust.
Replace a manual loop with a small, well-scoped automation — a script, a worker, an agent on a timer — and see how far it gets before you have to babysit it.
The CLI, the dashboard, the internal API, the thing your team keeps saying someone should finally build. Sit down and build the rough version.
The half-formed project you haven't found a reason to start. This is the reason. No production-readiness required, no roadmap to defend.
What Happens Here
The Builders Zone is less a schedule and more an atmosphere. Expect a mix of these throughout the event:
Developers building things in front of you, narrating their choices, taking questions while they work.
Short, candid demos of agents people have actually shipped or are still wrestling with — including the failure modes.
Sit down at a table, open your laptop, and build alongside whoever else pulls up a chair. Pair on something gnarly or just share Wi-Fi and headphones.
Working coding-agent and MCP setups, walked through end to end — config, prompts, guardrails — instead of slides.
Show up with a workflow that almost works, get help from people who have hit the same wall. Leave with it less broken.
Compare stacks, prompts, and review loops with developers who are deep in the same problems. The unscheduled half of the value.
Agent Showcase
Demo what you've made to a room of developers who'll actually try to break them. OpenClaw-inspired builds, NanoClaw forks, Claude Agent SDK experiments, MCP servers, coding-agent workflows, and your own thing — the cron job with delusions of grandeur included.
Bring Your Laptop
The Builders Zone is part of every ticket to WeAreDevelopers World Congress North America. Bring your laptop, bring an idea, and we'll see you on the floor.
