For re:Invent attendees: Let Autopilot watch for open seats and reserve automatically
An independent, local-first Go agent that reserves AWS re:Invent 2026 session seats the moment they open, upgrades your schedule automatically, and keeps your day walkable, built on the new AWS Events API.
MTS @ Upmo AI, MSc. Student @ UvA
The problem: re:Invent is a real-time contention game
re:Invent is a real-time seat game. With more than 2,400 sessions across five Las Vegas venues, finding sessions that interest you is only half the job. Popular workshops and chalk talks can fill within minutes of registration opening. If you miss a seat, you may have to keep checking for a cancellation.
There is no waitlist in the AWS Events API. The only way to find out if a seat has opened is to try to reserve it. That can mean repeatedly checking the sessions you want, while keeping the rest of your schedule in order.
Autopilot for re:Invent does that checking for you. Run it locally, choose the sessions you want, and let it watch for seats and reserve them when they become available.
Autopilot for re:Invent is an independent, unofficial project. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Amazon Web Services. “AWS” and “re:Invent” are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates, used here only to describe the event this tool helps you navigate.
Set your priorities. Keep your schedule yours.
Add your target sessions as a ranked list. Autopilot checks them on a quota-aware schedule and attempts to reserve a seat when one opens. It reports whether the reservation succeeded, rather than treating every request as a booking.
You can also keep a “good enough” session as a placeholder while Autopilot watches for a higher-ranked choice in the same time slot. If the better session becomes available, it can swap your reservation. It cancels the placeholder first, then tries to book the upgrade. If that booking fails, it attempts to restore your original reservation. If the restoration also fails, it clearly warns you to check your schedule.
Your personal time matters too. Add lunch, travel, or a meeting as a personal-time block. The planner treats those blocks as hard constraints and will not target sessions that overlap them.
Keep your week practical
The five re:Invent venues are spread across the Strip. A session can look perfect on paper and still be hard to reach after the one before it.
Autopilot estimates walking time between venues and flags back-to-back reservations that may be difficult to make. It can also suggest closer sessions in the same time slot, based on the walking time they save between your neighbouring sessions.
The dashboard gives you one place to review your week. See your sessions by day, spot time conflicts and tight walks, and review favourites that you have not reserved. You can search the catalogue by title, session code, topic, service, or speaker, then favourite, reserve, or add a result to your target list.
A dry-run mode lets you see what Autopilot would do before it changes your schedule. The activity log explains each decision, such as “would grab SEC406: open slot; reservable target available.”
Runs on your laptop
Autopilot is a single Go binary with an embedded dashboard. You sign in with your AWS Builder ID through a local loopback flow. Your access and refresh tokens are encrypted on disk, and the token is sent only to
api.awsevents.com . It is never logged or put in a URL.The dashboard listens only on your computer. It checks incoming
Host and Origin headers to help stop other websites from using its local reserve and cancel actions.Your schedule and tokens stay on your machine. There is no hosted service collecting attendees’ schedules. One limitation is worth knowing: refreshing a token does not extend the underlying Builder ID session. You will need to sign in interactively again from time to time.
Built to be careful
Autopilot checks the API’s published limits before sending requests. Each operation has its own rate limiter, and the client also honours a
Retry-After response if the service returns a 429 .The planner separates decisions from network calls. Given your reservations, personal-time blocks, and session details, it returns an explainable plan: grab, upgrade, or hold. That makes its rules easier to test, including the rule that personal time cannot be overridden.
The API’s live response shapes also differed from some documented examples. I checked the actual responses with a raw-JSON probe before relying on them. That caught a decoding mismatch that had made an account with reservations appear to have none.
Try it
The repository has the full setup and run instructions. With Docker:
git clone https://github.com/SumonMSelim/reinvent-autopilot.gitcd reinvent-autopilot
docker build -t reinvent-autopilot:latest .
docker compose run --service-ports reinvent-autopilot logindocker compose run --rm --service-ports reinvent-autopilot serveThen open
http://localhost:8577 .Choose the sessions you want, mark the ones you would take as placeholders, and add your personal blocks. Autopilot can keep watch for the seats you missed, while you focus on getting ready for re:Invent 2026.
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