The first Claude Meetup in Montenegro happened on Saturday, April 25, 2026, inside the Opština Bar municipal hall. 50+ builders, operators, founders, students, and a handful of curious minds spent the afternoon there. AI Harbour: Claude Meetup ran as part of the Montenegro Future Festival, and it turned into something that felt less like a tech event and more like the start of a community. 

We have been organising Claude meetups across the region for a while now. Each one teaches us something new about who is showing up and why. Montenegro had its own answer.

A Room That Looked Different From Other Cities

The crowd in Bar was a mix you do not see in every city. Software engineers sitting next to law students. Municipality folks talking to early-stage founders. People who had been using Claude Code for months were sitting next to people who had downloaded it the night before. The questions afterward made it clear: nobody was there for a demo. They were there to figure out what to actually do with this.

That cross-disciplinary mix changes the texture of the discussion in a way that more uniform tech crowds usually do not. It also tells you something about where Montenegro is right now: the conversation about AI is not happening in a single industry silo. It is happening across them.

Building a Municipality App Live, On Stage

Jakša Vučković ran the technical session and it was the kind of demo that gets quoted later. He set up a simple automated software factory live on stage, then used it to build an Issue Reporting app for the Municipality of Bar from a blank repo. The whole thing was up and running by the end of the talk. You can see the working app at meetup.jaksa.me.

It was a clean piece of evidence for what AI-assisted development actually looks like when you stop thinking of the model as a chatbot and start thinking of it as part of a development pipeline. The crowd watched a real, deployable tool come together in front of them. That is a very different proposition from a slide deck about agentic coding.

AI Agents in Real Workflows

Josip Vlah and Luka Mrkić followed with a session on AI agent applications. Less about code, more about how agents are being applied inside real workflows: marketing, ops, internal tooling, and the operational layer of running a small team. The emphasis was practical. What works today, what is worth automating, and where the limits actually are.

This is the part of the AI conversation that often gets skipped at conferences. People want to know what the day-to-day looks like. What does an agent actually do when it is plugged into a real business? Where does it break? How do you start? The session leaned into all of that.

Why the Q&A Was the Real Signal

The Q&A blocks ran longer than scheduled. That is usually the best sign a meetup is doing its job. People asked about responsible use, about what jurists should be learning, about how municipalities could actually deploy something like the Issue Reporting app, and about how small teams can run agentic workflows without breaking. Nobody left early.

A few things stood out about Montenegro specifically. The policy and public-sector interest is real. The fact that the meetup happened inside the municipal hall and that the demo was a tool for the Municipality is not an accident. There is a serious conversation happening here about how AI gets deployed in public-facing contexts, and the people in the room want to be part of shaping it instead of waiting for it to arrive.

The legal community showed up too. Several law students attended and the questions about reasoning, ethics, and the rule of law were some of the sharpest of the afternoon.

Thanks to the People Who Made It Happen

The event was hosted as part of Montenegro Future Festival and supported by Infinum, IT Hub Bar, Oraicle, and Espressio.  Mladen Rakonjac and the Infinum team helped make it happen, and Ivan Joličić, Luka Mrkić, Jakša Vučković, and Filip Šoć did the work of pulling everything together on the ground.

For a first event in a country we had not run a Claude meetup in before, the energy was unmistakable. The kind of room where people stay after, exchange contacts, and ask when the next one is.

What Comes Next

The next one is coming. We are already talking to the people who showed up about what to cover, who should speak, and how to keep the momentum going. If you are building with AI in Montenegro, in the wider Balkans, or anywhere in the region and you want to be in the loop, follow RZLT, Espressio, and Oraicle. We will announce the next date soon.

For everyone who came on Saturday, asked questions, stayed for the networking, and helped make the first one matter: thank you. You set the tone for what these meetups are going to look like in Montenegro from here on out.