Work in Progress

Forge started on 22 August with around ten people, a room at BASE and no real plan beyond "let's see who turns up."

People turned up with things. Adrian showed their Raspberry PI testing project, helping his team remote test devices that are not connected and in locations several hours away. None of what was talked about was finished, which was exactly the point. A work in progress is more interesting to talk about than a polished demo, because everyone can see the decisions still being made.

The conversation went where it wanted to. We spent a good while on the ethics of AI: what we're comfortable handing over to it, where it's quietly making decisions we used to make ourselves, and who's responsible when it gets things wrong. From there it moved to what happens when AI leaves the screen and ends up in physical tooling, machines and the real world. It was a different set of stakes from a chatbot getting a fact wrong, and it's a topic we'll come back to.

We finished by talking about what Forge should actually be. The answer was clear: not a conference, not a networking event, and not a series of talks you sit through. It should be a room where people who build things can work alongside each other, show what they're making, and get honest opinions from people who get it. Everything since has been shaped by that conversation.