Lunatechs Meetup · April 23, 2026
A casual night for people who wanted to build their first app.
The premise fit in one sentence: bring a laptop, grab boba, open Cursor, and build the smallest version of an app.
I helped host as one of the Lunatechs organizers, alongside Berkeley Club Hong Kong. Some people already coded. Some had barely touched a terminal. The job was to make the first step feel normal.
The room settled into work quickly. People asked what to prompt next, read the output, hit errors, and watched an app start forming on their own laptop.
The setup
No stage, no formal lecture, just a table full of laptops.
Central Market worked because it already feels easy to enter. Open tables, food nearby, enough noise to make imperfect questions feel normal.
That changed the workshop. Less presentation, more shared work session. People asked for setup help, compared prompts, and showed each other small wins.
The beginner loop
Most first apps came from repeating a very small loop.
Describe it
Start with the app idea in plain English, then make the first version smaller than the idea in your head.
Let Cursor draft
Use the AI to create the first rough version, then read enough of the output to know what changed.
Run it
The moment something opens locally, the abstract idea of “coding” becomes much less intimidating.
Fix one thing
Instead of trying to understand the whole stack, pick the next visible problem and ask better questions.
The room
People came from different starting points, but the table made it feel shared.
This is what I like about Lunatechs events. The room does not have to split into beginners and experts. A developer can help with setup. A first-timer can ask the question everyone was avoiding.
Berkeley Club Hong Kong brought in people who were curious about AI tools but had not found the right on-ramp. By halfway through, the labels stopped mattering.
What I realized
The first app does not need to be impressive. It needs to be yours.
For new builders, the first shift is emotional. The laptop stops feeling sealed. The editor stops looking like a room for other people.
Vibe coding is messy. Beginners still need taste, patience, and debugging stamina. But as an on-ramp, it works.
Closing note
More people need a low-pressure first build night.
Another AI panel would not have done it. Sitting beside someone, getting one screen to render, and fixing the first broken thing did.