About us
Welcome to PHP Sussex!
Based out of Brighton, we meet in person and online every other month to discuss and learn about all things PHP and web development.
You can see the recording of our past meetups on YouTube and follow us on X, Bluesky and Mastodon for latest news.
Some talks are more technical than others but everyone is welcome – feel free to join our next event!
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Cheers,
The PHP Sussex team
Upcoming events
1
November | Building and running Web Apps with AI tools
Runway East, Runway East, York And Elder Works, 50 New England St, Brighton, BN1 4AW, Brighton and Hove, GBLast 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.
8 attendees
Past events
55
![EVOLVE [26]: Shaping Tomorrow](https://secure.meetupstatic.com/photos/event/8/9/d/9/highres_532715289.jpeg)
