It's the same community it has always been, for developers across Brighton and the South Coast, and it still covers the full spread: web, cloud, DevOps, architecture, testing, open source and developer tools. The new name simply says out loud what most of us are already doing every day. We are building software in the age of AI, and it makes sense to have a room where we can talk honestly about what that means in practice. The strapline puts it well: "building software in the age of AI".

Presenting in September

On 30 September I had the pleasure of giving a talk at The Skiff: From Zero to AI: How a Small Studio Rebuilt the Way It Ships Software.

It was the story of how a small studio took AI from a curiosity to part of how we build and run a live production platform for a Fortune 500 research and advisory firm. It started in 2023, when Constantin, one of our developers, began using Copilot in VS Code and kept telling the rest of us what it was getting right. From there we moved, step by step, to agentic tools working across all 28 of our repositories, with the first agent-assisted commits landing in December 2025 and a CLAUDE.md written into most repositories by early 2026.

The one idea I wanted people to leave with

AI doesn't fix your engineering. It amplifies whatever is already there.

If your repositories have clear structure, written conventions and a pipeline you trust, AI tools make you faster, because they have something good to follow. If your codebase is inconsistent and the rules live in people's heads, the tools learn the inconsistency and produce more of it, faster. The work that made the biggest difference for us wasn't choosing a model. It was the dull, valuable work of writing down how we build things, putting the infrastructure into layers, and making the pipeline the single route to production.

That was also the message that drew the most questions afterwards, which told me it lands with people who are living it.

The best bit was the room

What I enjoyed most was the conversation. The questions were sharp and practical, from how we handle review and accountability to where agentic tools fall over in real estates. The chat carried on well after the talk finished, and I came away with as many ideas as I brought. That is exactly what a good local meetup is for.

A big thank you to Gavin Badcock and the organisers for inviting me and for the work that goes into keeping the community going, and to The Skiff for hosting.

See you in November

The next session is Brighton Dev.AI, November 2026, on Wednesday 25 November at The Skiff, 30 Cheapside, Brighton BN1 4GD. Doors open at 6:30pm for a 7:00pm start.

Yannick Chenot will be asking "In the age of AI, what is a Software Developer?". It's a question I've been turning over myself since the talk, so I'm looking forward to hearing his take and to the discussion afterwards.

If you build software anywhere near Brighton, whether you're deep into AI tooling or still deciding what you think of it, come along. You'll find the details on the Brighton Dev.AI meetup page.

See you there.