South by AI

March 10, 2026

Every year around this time, the same thing happens. SXSW publishes its schedule and you open it up and there are thousands of sessions and you think, okay, I’ll just scroll through and pick the good ones. And then forty-five minutes later you’ve got 472 tabs open and no plan and you’re already exhausted and the fucking thing hasn’t even started yet.

I’ve lived in Austin for years now and this ritual never gets less annoying or overwhelming. So this year I built something.1

What it is

South by AI is a personalized SXSW schedule builder, powered by Claude. You take a 60-second quiz—what badge you have, what topics you care about, what your vibe is, which days you’re in town—and it builds you a full schedule from the 4,000+ sessions on the official SXSW lineup.

Behind the scenes, Claude is reading every session description, cross-referencing your preferences, checking for time conflicts, and assembling a day-by-day plan with top picks and alternatives. You get a timeline view, a list view, and a map view showing where everything is.

If you don’t like what it picked, you refine it through chat. “Add more music.” “Free up Friday afternoon.” “I want to see Japanese Breakfast on Thursday.” It adjusts the schedule and explains what changed.2

Then you can share the link with your schedule so you can actually find your friends.

How I built it

The whole thing is a Next.js app running on Vercel, built entirely with Claude Code over about a week.3 I scraped the full SXSW schedule using Playwright, stored the session data as static JSON, and wired up Claude’s API to do the actual schedule generation.

I set up a team of specialized Claude Code agents—a scraper, frontend engineers, designers, copywriters, code reviewers, QA testers—and let them build the thing in parallel across isolated git worktrees. One person, twelve agents. I wrote the plan, they executed it. And it was my first time using --dangerously-skip-permissions, which lets Claude Code run autonomously without asking for approval on every file edit and terminal command. I sandboxed the whole thing in its own directory and let it rip one morning while I got the kids ready for school.

The tech stack: Next.js 14, React, Tailwind, Anthropic SDK for Claude, Vercel KV for storage, and @vercel/og for share card images. Nothing exotic.

Why I’m sharing this

It feels genuinely useful, and these days if something feels useful you can just… build it. I talked about this in Building this site with Claude Code—I’m not an engineer, but that matters less and less. If you’re heading to SXSW this week, go try it. It takes (literally) a minute.

Footnotes

  1. Funny enough, I’m not even going to SXSW this year. I just instinctively felt the pain and decided to see if Claude Code could build something interesting. ↩︎

  2. Important caveat: have not tested this extensively, so spot check your work here as you would with any AI output. ↩︎

  3. Maybe ~1 hour of my actual time? Vibe-coding is crazy. ↩︎