Brighton Dev.AI - November 2026

Tonight we are delighted to be having a new talk from Craig West and then followed up with a new talk from PHP Sussex organiser, and long time member of our meetup, 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:

"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

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 Craig and then Yannick's talks starting at 7pm ish.

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