Practically AI Manchester — October (Talks TBC)

Practically AI's October meetup at AZoNetwork's offices in NEO on Charlotte Street, with two talks on the same theme: as AI takes on more of software engineering, the engineering fundamentals matter more rather than less. Phil Whittaker walks through the stages teams pass through as they move from simple prompting to managing context, building agent harnesses, and eventually running reliable autonomous development loops and graphs, looking at what each stage solves and what new problems it creates. The session keeps returning to the traditional practices, testing, architecture and observability, that make any of it work. Doors from six, talks from half six. Why go: most agentic-AI talks are demos; this one is about what breaks at each step and why your existing engineering discipline is the thing that saves you. Best for software engineers and leads actually shipping AI-assisted work.