About
The first event we’re hosting ourselves. A casual evening for builders, tinkerers, and curious people in Leuven. Bring a laptop. Bring whatever AI stack you’re working with. Show up at Cafe de Fiere Margriet, get a beer, build something, and share what you’re doing with the people next to you.
No slides. No agenda. The format is simple: BYOAI (Bring Your Own AI) — whatever you’re running, experimenting with, or trying to get to work. The people who show up tend to be more interesting than any programme we could write. Let’s start.
What to Bring
- Laptop
- Beer
- Your AI stack
- Claude / Cursor / Copilot
- Good vibes
The Stack
“The Local Stack” — the layers that make up an independent AI setup running on your own hardware:
What is Vibe Coding?
Vibe Coding
Vibe coding is the practice of building software with an AI model as your primary collaborator — describing what you want in natural language, letting the model generate the code, then steering, correcting, and extending rather than writing from scratch. The term was popularised by Andrej Karpathy in early 2025 and quickly became shorthand for a distinct mode of development: faster, more improvisational, and accessible to people who code but wouldn’t call themselves engineers. The tools that make it work — Cursor, Claude Code, Copilot, Cline — are now capable enough that a solo developer can build and ship things in an evening that would have taken a week two years ago.
BYOAI — Bring Your Own AI
This meetup has no prescribed tools and no sponsored stack. BYOAI means what it says: bring whatever you’re working with. Running Ollama with a local Mistral or Llama model? Bring that. Paying for Claude Pro and using Cursor? Bring that. Experimenting with a fine-tuned model on your GPU? Especially bring that. The interesting conversations happen when people with different setups are working in the same room and can look over at each other’s screens. What are you running? What broke? What surprised you?
AI in Leuven — Why the Community Matters
Leuven has an unusually dense concentration of AI research at KU Leuven, imec, and Flanders Make. But the local community of people actually building with AI — running models, shipping tools, experimenting with agents and pipelines, regardless of whether those run local or in the cloud — is dispersed, mostly working alone or in small teams. The Local Stack exists to change that. A café in Leuven with laptops open is not a scaled conference or a corporate tech event. It’s a room where people who care about this stuff can talk to each other. That is harder to find than it should be, and it’s worth building deliberately.
Attend
Organised by
The Local Stack
A community site and event series for people building with AI in Leuven and Belgium. Not affiliated with any institution. Not sponsored by anyone. Just builders in a room.
thelocalstack.info ›