Build First Turns Shakespeare Into an AI Build Lab at Betaworks During #AIWeekNY
Software used to separate the technical from the ambitious. That line is collapsing fast. Founders without engineering backgrounds are prototyping products. Operators are building internal tools between meetings. Writers are touching codebases without waiting for permission from somebody treating GitHub access like classified government material. That shift is reshaping the startup ecosystem in real time.
Building with the Bard: Remixing Shakespeare during #AIWeekNY lands directly inside that moment. On Friday, May 15, Build First is hosting an in-person breakfast workshop at Betaworks in New York City where participants will use Claude Code to transform the complete works of William Shakespeare into AI-powered creations. The event is presented by Build First and hosted by Bethany Crystal, Pulse NYC, and Jamie Dubs. Bethany Crystal, Founder and CEO of Build First, is the featured session leader guiding attendees through the build experience from start to finish. Chatbots. Remixed plays. Sonnet generators. Interactive visualizations. Shakespeare enters the terminal window and literature starts behaving like product infrastructure.
The concept works because the collision makes immediate sense. Shakespeare represents one of the richest public-domain language datasets ever assembled. Claude Code represents one of the most capable AI coding agents available to non-engineers in 2026. Put them together and the psychology changes quickly. Writers begin thinking like product teams. Operators start behaving like creators. Non-technical founders realize they no longer need permission to prototype ideas themselves.
Bethany Crystal gives the room credibility because Bethany Crystal lived the non-technical side of the technology industry before becoming a builder. Stack Overflow. Union Square Ventures. Tech:NYC. The Uniswap Foundation. Long before Build First launched in July 2025, Bethany Crystal spent years inside institutions where technical fluency often determined influence. Then came MuseKat, the AI-powered learning companion built without an engineering background. That experience became the foundation for Build First, which has since trained more than 1,500 people between ages 8 and 80 to build AI-powered tools.
Pulse NYC brings the broader connective tissue. As the organizer behind #AIWeekNY, Pulse NYC has become one of the central community drivers connecting founders, operators, investors, engineers, and policymakers across New York’s AI scene. Jamie Dubs, listed as an event host alongside Pulse NYC and Bethany Crystal, helps anchor the workshop inside that wider community-led movement shaping how AI conversations happen across the city.
The workshop itself is intentionally hands-on. Participants will download Shakespeare’s complete works, feed the material into Claude Code, and build directly inside the session. Build First provides breakfast. Attendees bring laptops, curiosity, and whatever creative instincts survived years of corporate meetings pretending innovation happens inside slide decks.
That matters because the startup ecosystem is shifting away from pure technical gatekeeping and toward clarity of thought, domain expertise, and execution speed. Claude Code handles syntax. Humans handle intent. The leverage equation changes immediately for strategists, marketers, educators, designers, and founders who spent years sitting adjacent to software creation instead of inside it.
AI Week New York already attracts founders, engineers, investors, executives, and policymakers trying to define what leadership looks like in the AI era. Building with the Bard feels different because participants are not gathering to watch the future discussed from a stage. They are there to test it directly. No fake futurism. No performance theater disguised as insight. Just laptops, prompts, Shakespeare, Claude Code, and a room full of people testing whether the next generation of builders might emerge from places the traditional startup ecosystem ignored for far too long.