Meetup #16 Reimagining Software Development With AI

About this event

Shaping our future with AI. Creating opportunity through AI fluency, connection and community.

No jargon. No hype. No confusing terminology.

NOTE: This event will be focussed on the changing shape of software development. Everyone is welcome to attend but the content will be somewhat technical.

Join us for our next in-person meetup in London on Thursday May 14th.

Our theme for this meetup is Reimagining Software Development with AI. We're going to take a step back and think about the role we, the humans, play in the software development process now that coding agents have arrived.

This event provides a small glimpse of the future, from the innovators who are challenging everything and rebuilding the process of software development from the ground up, with humans at the centre!

Where and When?

• Thursday, May 14th
• Doors open at 18:00
• Talks start at 19:00
• AutogenAI, 123 Pentonville Rd, London N1 9LG

Talk 1: The Validation Gap: We Need A Better Way To Review AI Generated Code (Robert Werner, Co-Founder & CTO Leapter)

AI coding is fast. We're generating more code than ever. But more code means more code to verify, and agentic workflows are scaling that gap faster than review processes can keep up.

The bottleneck didn't disappear. It moved from writing code to verifying logic.

For most generated code, you can ship, test, and iterate. But what if we need to be sure? What about the code that runs our financial systems or decides if you qualify for a loan? It has to be right.

Hope is not a strategy, we need to better ways to review code. In this talk Robert will share his recent innovations, experiments and insights with you.

About Robert:
Robert Werner is the CTO of an AI startup dedicated to shaping the future of AI-native software development. He has over 20 years experience focussed on Software Engineering, Developer Experience and Transformational Platform Engineering, across Fortune 500 companies and FinTechs.

Talk 2: Narrative Engineering: What Cognitive Science Actually Tells Us About Building with LLMs (Sal Kimmich, Security Architect at Gadfly AI)

We keep treating LLMs like search engines that hallucinate. That is the wrong category, and it produces the wrong engineering.

LLMs are narrative generators. They do not retrieve facts or execute logic. They complete stories. That distinction is not philosophical. It determines what kind of system you can build with them and what kind you cannot. Neuroscience has been studying probabilistic, distributed, narrative-generating systems for decades. Most of the LLM engineering field is ignoring that work.

This talk walks through cyberneutics, an open source methodology and repository built on the premise that we need a new engineering discipline for narrative computing the way software engineering emerged from symbolic computing. The theoretical foundations come from second-order cybernetics, distributed cognition, and Minsky's Society of Mind. The empirical validation comes from 2025 mechanistic interpretability research showing that reasoning models internally simulate multi-agent dialogue to reason better. The practical techniques come from iterative practice: adversarial committees, pipeline algebra with formal quality propagation, observer-aware interaction design.

Three real lessons for practitioners building agentic systems: reliability is a property of the pipeline, not the prompt; repetition is latent space exploration, not failure; and if you want auditable AI reasoning, you need to externalise the dialogue structure, because the transcript is the explainability artifact.

The discipline does not exist yet. This is what building it looks like.

About Sal: Sal is a developer advocate for open source and passionate about helping engineers, ethical hackers and digital enthusiasts understand the complexity of modern software development. With over a decade of experience as building cloud-native machine learning pipelines in the healthcare and tech for good sectors, their work is now focused on filling the cracks in the open source software supply chain to build a better digital future for all of us.

Thanks!
We'd like to thank our sponsors Leapter and AutogenAI for making this event possible.

Code of Conduct
This event has a code of conduct that you can review here. By joining the community and registering for this event you agree to abide by our code of conduct.

Providing Your Name and Email
To register for this event you'll be asked to provide your email address. After the event you will be automatically subscribed to the newsletters from AI for the rest of us and Leapter GmbH. You can unsubscribe at any time (But why would you? They are really very good!)