What Happens When You Give a Community Its Own Brain?

By Jack Mielke

…an early render of Vibey

At Edge Esmeralda last summer, my friend Mariella told me something that stuck with me. Three separate people came up to her throughout the month and said: "Eddie told me I should meet you."

Eddie was our community AI. A Telegram bot that lived in the group chat of 600+ people. It knew everyone's bios (based on their intro messages), remembered what happened at workshops, and could answer things like:

• "who here should I meet in biotech?”
• “what’s happening today?”
• “where are the best discounted food spots nearby?”
• “please summarize what’s happened in the group chat over the last week”

Eddie wasn't a product. It was an experiment. I built it with n8n, an Airtable database, and some duct tape. But something about it worked... people actually talked to it. They asked it for food recommendations (shoutout to Atin's #1 dollar-to-calorie ratio Mexican restaurant review that Eddie remembered for the rest of the month). They asked it who to meet. They asked it to catch them up on sessions they missed. It could even explain what Edge Esmeralda is all about in the first place! 🤯

It was the first time I experienced an AI that felt less like a tool and more like a member of the community.

The problem we kept running into

I've helped build 9 pop-up villages at this point. Edge Esmeralda, Edge City Lanna, Edge City Patagonia, Flow Phangan, Mars College, and more. Despite these being some of the most tech-savvy gatherings on earth, the same problems kept showing up:

What events are happening today? Who should I meet here? What was that person's name again? What happened at the talk I missed?

Key information just disappears – or is too fragmented to find. It lives in someone's head, or in a Telegram thread from three days ago that nobody's going to scroll back through. The bigger the community, the worse it gets.

This is what led me down the rabbit hole of trying to create the most intelligent, socially connected AI assistant possible.

Flow → Eddie → Vibey

It started small. At Flow Phangan (a residency in Thailand for AI-native builders I co-hosted) in early 2025, I built a community AI named Flow for our Telegram group of 100 people. It could answer basic questions about the community and the area. It was useful and funny - but limited.