A small group inside the Applied AI Club that builds software for other student organizations at Penn State.

Do I need to know how to code?

No, and most of us do not. We work with AI tools that write most of the code, and you learn by using them on something real.

What would I actually work on?

Whatever another club needs. Usually a website, a small tool, or something that broke and nobody has time to fix.

A few hours a week during the semester.

Any Penn State student with a psu.edu email address, undergraduate or graduate, in any major.

No. Labs is free to join, and free for the student organizations we build for.

What is Labs?: A small group inside the Applied AI Club that builds software for other student organizations at Penn State.
Do I need to know how to code?: No, and most of us do not. We work with AI tools that write most of the code, and you learn by using them on something real.
What would I actually work on?: Whatever another club needs. Usually a website, a small tool, or something that broke and nobody has time to fix.
How much time does it take?: A few hours a week during the semester.
Who can join?: Any Penn State student with a psu.edu email address, undergraduate or graduate, in any major.
Does it cost anything?: No. Labs is free to join, and free for the student organizations we build for.

You are not expected to know any of this yet, and most of us do not.

We are taking a small group this fall. Plan on a few hours a week through the end of the semester.

Ten models from six companies. These are the ones we plan to work with and learn our way around.

Anthropic

Claude Fable 5.1

Tied with GPT-6 Astra as the most expensive model here. Worth reaching for only when a problem is genuinely hard.

Prices are OpenRouter's listed rates, checked weekly. They are US dollars per million . Hover any underlined term for what it means.

The program you work with a model through is called a . Labs uses OpenRouter for its models. OpenRouter is a service that reaches every model above.

Memory

Persistent memory

A harness can keep notes about a project between sessions, so you are not re-explaining the same codebase every time you sit down.

OpenRouter bills by the token for whichever model a harness is pointed at.