About us
A community for software engineers exploring how AI can supercharge the way we build and operate software. We focus on practical, production-ready uses of AI in engineering workflows, including:
- AI-assisted coding – Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, and beyond
- AI-driven dev environments & orchestration – MCP servers, CrewAI, LangGraph, PydanticAI
- Automated testing & CI/CD – accelerating quality and delivery
- AI-powered operations & monitoring – intelligent alerts, diagnostics, and remediation
- Infrastructure automation – provisioning, scaling, and management with AI
This is not a data science meetup — we focus on the engineering side of AI: tools, automation, and systems that make software development faster, smarter, and more reliable.
Join us in Manchester, the #1 AI-ready city in the UK, and be part of the future of AI in software engineering!
Upcoming events
3
Adam Davis - When AI Meets the Real World
Matillion, Two, New Bailey St, Stanley St, Salford M3 5GS, Manchester, GBAI makes it incredibly easy to build things. Getting those things to work reliably in the real world is a very different engineering problem.
For September's Practically AI, Adam Davis will take us through what happens when AI-assisted development leaves the safety of your laptop and encounters physical devices, computer vision, networks, unpredictable environments and, perhaps most unpredictably, actual people.
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Adam Davis : When AI Meets the Real World
Adam will share the story of building pixelmesh, a side project that turns a room full of audience phones into a distributed display. AI helped take an unusual idea and turn it into working software quickly — but getting that software to work with real devices, networks and people exposed an entirely different set of challenges.
Through a live audience demo and plenty of examples of things going wrong, Adam will explore what happened when assumptions made during development collided with reality. He'll look at how he learned to test the things he couldn't control, and why observability, experimentation and feedback loops became far more valuable than simply writing better prompts.
This is a practical look at what building with AI actually feels like once your software has to work outside the controlled environment where you created it.
You'll learn:
- Where AI-assisted development can dramatically accelerate building — and where it can't help you
- What happens when assumptions made during development meet real devices, networks and users
- How to test systems when you don't control all the variables
- Why observability becomes critical when AI-built software leaves your laptop
- How experimentation and feedback loops help turn an AI-assisted prototype into something that actually works
And yes, there'll be a live pixelmesh demo involving the audience.
----------------------------------------Who Should Attend:
Software engineers, tech leads, architects and engineering leaders using AI to build real software. If you're using coding agents or AI-assisted development and discovering that generating the code is increasingly the easy part, this talk is for you.
Why It's Worth Attending:
Practically AI is about the engineering reality of building with AI — real implementations, real problems and lessons you can take back to work.
Adam's experience with pixelmesh is a great example of where software engineering is heading. AI can help us move from idea to working software remarkably quickly, but testing, observability, experimentation and understanding the environment our software operates in matter more than ever.
Come for the live demo and practical lessons, then stick around for pizza, questions and conversations with other engineers building with AI across Manchester.
Agenda:
18:30 – Doors, pizza & mingling
18:50 – Introductions & AI Spotlight
19:15 – Talk: When AI Meets the Real World – Adam Davis
20:00 – Q&A
20:15 – Open social & refreshments
20:30 – After event social at The Sawyer's Arms6 attendees
Past events
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