19 September 2026 · 13 attended
Enter the Playground
How it went
The second Forge was on 19 September, and 15+ people came, up from ten last time. The room at BASE felt properly full for the first time.
Jim opened with the new Community section on the site. Everyone who signs up now gets a profile with skills and collab tags, so you can see who does what and who is looking to build with someone. If you haven't set yours up, it takes a minute.
Then Jim showed Shipyard, a small tool he built to take the grind out of testing. It watches the repos he's working on, pulls the latest changes and runs the full test suite. If a branch has a shipyard.yaml file, it goes further: it starts Claude from the command line with a testing prompt, and Claude works through the app like a person would. It clicks through with Playwright, takes screenshots and reports back on what it found. The result is manual testing without the manual.
Peter followed with Aether, managed Kubernetes built and hosted in the EU. It's the product that came out of years he's spent deep in infrastructure. He didn't give a sales pitch. He challenged the room to break it. The offer stands for any DevOps people reading this.
After that, the afternoon split up the way it's supposed to. Small groups formed around laptops. People showed apps, and conversations about AI started in three corners at once.
During the lunch break - a holiday time-off app was vibe coded from scratch in about 20 minutes, just by prompting. It was a working app from an idea in the time it takes to eat a sandwich.
Then Vlad showed three apps he's built with Claude, using Fable for the planning and Opus for the building. Vlad isn't a senior developer, and that was the point. The gap between "I have an idea" and "I have a working app" is smaller than it has ever been, and you don't need ten years of experience to cross it anymore.
That's where October picks up. If you've got something half-built, bring it to Half-Baked on 17 October and let's get it finished.
What got shown
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Shipyard — Full manual testing without clicking
shown by James 'Jim' Quayle
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Aether — Managed Kubernetes for teams who already run Kubernetes.
shown by Péter-Zoltán Keresztes
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fiisigur — Vibe coded SSM apps built without a dev
shown by Vlad
