🧭 SaugaTech Meetup #10 Recap — Defending the Prompt: The Day We Tried to Break an AI

Summer arrived at IDEA Square One on June 20th — and so did 45 people who weren’t interested in just chasing the latest buzzword.

That’s what made Meetup #10 feel different before it even started. The last few sessions — Vibe Coding, Agentic AI — drew people riding the wave of something new and shiny. This one drew people who wanted to understand something real. Security isn’t a trend. It’s the thing that keeps your product standing once the hype settles. The room knew that. You could feel it in the conversations before we even called things to order.

But it wasn’t only the topic that pulled people in. A lot of folks showed up as much for each other as for the content — techies with curious side projects and no shortage of opinions, finally in a room full of people like them. That social energy, the easy back-and-forth between strangers who clicked fast, is becoming one of SaugaTech’s signatures. And on a warm Saturday afternoon in the first meetup of the summer, it was especially alive.

Meetup #10 also happened to be a milestone. And we treated it like one.

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Meetup #10 — A Milestone That Means More Than the Number

Ten meetups. It sounds like a number. But for those of us who were in that first room at RiverGrove Community Centre in April 2025 — a handful of strangers who found each other through a Reddit post — it feels like something much more than that.

We started with a simple frustration: Mississauga had the talent, the ambition, and the energy. What it lacked was a place to come together. Fourteen months later, we have 250+ members on WhatsApp, 500+ subscribers on the Compass newsletter, and a community that keeps showing up — not because they have to, but because they want to.

Meetup #10 felt like the right moment to pause, look back at how far we’ve come, and — more importantly — be explicit about where we’re going.

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Why are we telling you all of this?

Because we believe a community deserves to know what it’s building toward. Transparency isn’t just a value — it’s a practice. If our vision resonates with you, we want you to lean in. And if you think we’re missing something, getting something wrong, or need a course correction — we genuinely want to hear it. This community is not ours to steer alone. It belongs to everyone in that room, and everyone who reads this.

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Defending the Prompt — The Room Gets Honest About AI Security

We’ve talked about AI at almost every SaugaTech session in some form. But Meetup #10 was the first time we went deep on something most builders quietly worry about but rarely discuss openly: what happens when your AI-powered product gets attacked?

Aries Youssefian and Samiul Islam opened the session — Aries from a systems architecture perspective, Samiul from a prompt engineering and model interaction lens. Between them, they’ve spent hundreds of hours building with, breaking, and securing AI systems in real environments. And true to the SaugaTech spirit, this wasn’t a lecture. It was a conversation.

We talked about how AI systems introduce attack surfaces that traditional security frameworks simply weren’t designed for. We talked about the gap between AI safety as a research field and AI security as a day-to-day engineering problem. We talked about what it actually means to secure a product that depends on a third-party model you don’t fully control.

And then we actually tried simulating an attack - with Gandalf.

For those who haven’t tried it — Gandalf by Lakera is a game that simulates prompt injection attempts. The premise is simple: try to trick an AI into revealing a secret password by manipulating its instructions. What sounds like a fun party trick quickly becomes a masterclass in how fragile AI guardrails can be — and how creative attackers can get.

Watching a room full of tech professionals try to outwit an AI in real time was equal parts hilarious and sobering. The laughter was genuine. So was the realisation that followed: if we can do this in a game, someone is doing this to production systems right now.

That’s the kind of learning that sticks.

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Builders Showcase — Three Products, Three Stories

Post-pizza, we handed the floor to three builders from our community. Ten minutes each. Real things being built — right here in the GTA.

🎁 Shreshtha Agarwal — Gift4u.ca

Shreshtha is building Gift4u.ca — Canada’s own AI-powered gift registry. The idea is elegant: create a gift registry, get AI-generated suggestions based on the recipient’s interests, and use direct links to buy the selected products. No more awkward “what do you want for your birthday?” conversations. No more gift cards that never get used.

What stood out was the clarity of the problem being solved. Gift-giving is universal, the friction is real, and the AI layer adds genuine value rather than being bolted on for the sake of it. The room had questions — and Shreshtha had answers.

🍽️ Ofir David — Simpa

Ofir is building Simpa — a community-powered platform that helps restaurant-goers find restaurants that match their dietary restrictions. Anyone who has navigated a dinner out with a mixed group of dietary needs knows exactly how painful this problem is.

What made Simpa interesting is the community angle. This isn’t just a filter on a restaurant app. It’s a platform where the community itself contributes to the knowledge base — making it richer and more reliable over time. The GTA, with its extraordinary diversity of cuisines and dietary communities, is exactly the right place to build this.

📈 Mahesh Krishnamurthy — VantagePier

Mahesh talked about his experience of building VantagePier, a vibe-coded platform for stock and portfolio analysis built for equity investors. Importantly, Mahesh built this product using Antigravity after getting inspired from our last meetup on Vibe Coding. That in a nutshell fortified our belief why spaces like SaugaTech are important, to see and get inspired to do things that we otherwise we would have never attempted.

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The Conversation That Stayed With Us

After the builders wrapped up, the conversations spilled into the room — the kind that don’t end when the session does.

One exchange in particular stuck.

We were talking about how the barrier to building has never been lower. Everyone is a tech person now. With the right AI tools, you can put together a great demo — even a working application — faster than ever before. The three builders we saw in this meetup are proof of that.

But here’s the thing: a Working app and a Scalable app are two very different things.

The real differentiator — the thing that separates a demo from a product that can handle thousands of simultaneous users without breaking, leaking data, or being manipulated — is architecture. It’s how you think about security from day one. It’s how you design for scale before you need it.

And that, in a way, is exactly what this meetup was about. The security session in the first half and the builders showcase in the second half weren’t two separate conversations. They were the same conversation — just approached from different angles.

Build fast. But build right.

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Thank You

To Aries and Samiul — for an honest, practical, and genuinely fun session. The Gandalf demo alone was worth the trip.

To Shreshtha, Ofir, and Mahesh — for having the courage to stand up in front of a room and show what you’re building. That takes guts. This community sees you.

To everyone who showed up on a Saturday afternoon — thank you. Forty-five people choosing to spend their weekend learning and connecting is not something we take for granted.

And if you’re building something and want a room that will take it seriously — reach out. The next Builders Showcase slot might have your name on it.

Who knows, maybe you’ll run into someone building the next Shopify, right here in Mississauga.

See You at the next one.

Let’s keep building, Let’s keep learning, Together.

Team SaugaTech

CONNECT | COLLABORATE | INNOVATE

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Github Link to Session Materials