Applying AI Events in Brighton

Last PHP Sussex meetup of 2026!

It’s almost exactly a year since Anthropic and OpenAI released Opus 4.5 and GPT 5.1, a turning point marking the transition from chatbots to autonomous agents. Many industry leaders started 2026 with entirely new perspectives on the technology, having had the time to experiment with those models over the Christmas break.

A year later, have those promises materialised?

James Turner, Technical Director & co-founder of Esparter Ltd, is one of those engineers who fully embraced AI for their development workflow. In “Building and running WebApps with AI tools”, he explains how he builds and maintains software using Large Language Models (LLMs).

Building and running WebApps with AI tools

When used properly AI can help drastically improve the efficiency (and quality) of building and maintaining software systems. Like any powerful tool, LLMs have practical limitations and second order effects that can result in negative consequences.

Taking one of our web-based SaaS products (orderwhizz.com) as an example we’ll look at some of those limitations and how they were mitigated. There will be some theory, code samples and recommendations for more effective use of LLMs when developing and supporting production web apps.

The meetup will take place at Runway East in Brighton from 6:30 pm, with the talk starting at around 7 pm. As always, there will be food and drinks and plenty of time to chat with fellow developers. After the talk, we’ll head to UnBarred Taproom, a 2-minute walk from our venue, to wind up the evening over a craft beer 🍻.

PHP Sussex is supported by Silicon Brighton and Runway East.

Runway East has been fighting boring offices since 2014. Members get team bliss guaranteed, space to scale and Big Desk Energy.

The first AI in the Wild Brighton meetup.

The event's premise is pretty simple. We're interested in talks about what implementing AI actually looks like in a real business and how marketing can use AI to deliver better marketing

The good, the bad, and the ugly: we're not just interested in the shiny outcome; we want to learn about the mistakes, the things you learnt from failing and what you did to achieve success.

Agenda:

• Why most AI pilots fail (and the ones that don't)

How to scope a proof of concept, define success before you start, and prove commercial impact rather than a good demo.

• Where to start: How to get your first AI project right

Your first AI project is exciting, but setting it up for success is critical. In this session, we’ll look at how to choose the right opportunity, how to measure success, assess your data and processes, build the right team, and move from idea to a practical MVP. We’ll also cover the common pitfalls: from starting with the technology rather than the problem, to underestimating data quality, governance, integration and change management - and how to build something that delivers measurable value rather than becoming another AI Pilot failure.

• Your new AI campaign analyst

A live demo of a tool that turns campaign data into insight, plus an honest account of what went wrong building it.

• Rise of the agentic workforce

From:, cross-platform reporting, data cleansing and competitive monitoring. What can realistically be handed over to AI tools.

Timings:
18:00 Arrive, food
18:30 Introductions
18:40 Talk one
19:10 Talk two
19:40 Talk three
20:00 Drinks and conversation
20:30 Close

Who this is for

AI in the Wild is for people in marketing and the commercial functions around it, the people expected to turn AI into revenue, efficiency or a better customer experience.

You will feel at home here if you work in:

• Marketing (brand, demand generation, digital, content, campaigns)
• CRM, lifecycle and customer marketing
• Ecommerce and digital commerce
• Sales and revenue operations
• Customer experience and service
• Data and analytics in a commercial context
• Business owners and leaders responsible for growth

Tonight we are delighted to be having 3 brand new talks on a variety of AI development topics. Our first presentation will be from Craig West on AI Agents, the second on building RAG pipelines by Andrew Cheesman and then a discussion on what being a Developer means with AI now by long time member of our meetup, and PHP Sussex Organiser, Yannick Chenot.

TALK 1:

"From AI Agents in HTML to creating our own coding agent - let's demystify and simplify." - Craig West

Talk summary:

By the end of this talk, you will see that AI Agents are code that use APIs to get answers to questions with data and then work with the response in some type of workflow.

Specifically, we will look at basic chat requests, tool calling, memory and the ReAct loop that is the basis of creating our minimal coding agent or harness.

A full repo of all the code, talk and much more will be given.

TALK 2:

"Building RAG with .Net, Jev and other stuff" - Andrew Cheeseman

Talk Summary:

Andrew with present a worked example of retrieval-augmented generation, built end to end in .NET. He will take 100's YouTube poker-coaching transcripts and walk through every step: getting the data out of
YouTube, sorting it with Jev (TypeSafe AI's new decision model), chunking and embedding it in C#, storing it in Amazon S3 Vectors, and giving Claude a search tool over MCP. Real data, live
demos, and the parts the tutorials skip.

This will be a hands on demo with live coding and real world examples.

TALK 3:

"In the age of AI, what is a Software Developer?" - Yannick Chenot

Talk summary:

If we’re not writing the code anymore, what’s left for us to do?

Judgement and taste, yes, but what does this mean in practice?

Whether you’ve embraced AI or are resisting it, the technology raises serious questions about the nature of the job. And if you’re considering software engineering as a career, knowing where to focus your attention can be challenging.

Does it still make sense to specialise in one layer of the stack? What do we need to let go of, and what warrants renewed attention?

Rather than predicting the future, this talk will help you identify what's being disrupted and where the value is going, reframing the software engineering role in the process.

SPEAKER BIOS:

Craig West, originally an SQL DBA, is an Agentic Engineer that started with WordPress and moved through JS and Python frameworks to ML/AI. Based in Brighton, he was a member of codebar.io and can be found walking his two dogs Leo and Pip. He is passionate about demystifying and simplifying AI Agents.
CraigWestAI.com

Andrew Cheeseman is a .NET developer and architect with 30 years in infrastructure, including four years as CTO of events-tech studio Graffic Jam. He works as a fractional chief architect and development lead through Cheesesharp, based in Hove.
cheesesharp.com

Yannick Chenot is a long term member of our group and also organises the PHP Sussex meetup in Brighton.
Yannick is a freelance Product Engineer and Fractional CTO based in Brighton, UK. Born and bred in Brittany, France, he has been building software since 2007 and is the founder of PixelWatcher.io, a webpage monitoring tool.

Doors open at 6:30pm with our first talf from Craig starting at 7pm. This will be followed by Andrew, a break for snacks and drinks and then followed by Yannick's talk to round off the evening.

As usual there will be half-time drinks and snacks included.

Please sign up so we can keep track of numbers on the night?

We look forward to seeing you there.

Thanks, Gavin