Build with AI: Berlin Meetup

📍 Hosted at JetBrains in Berlin by Vanishing Gradients and Explosion We’re bringing together builders, researchers, and curious minds to share what they’re working on and connect in person. Two practical talks, a run of lightning demos, and plenty of time to hang out, ask questions, and compare notes with other people building AI systems. 🎤 Talks Vibe NLP for Applied NLP, Ines Montani, spaCy and Explosion Breaking a complex business problem into useful NLP components still requires domain expertise, careful reasoning, and dozens of technical decisions. Ines will show how ideas from coding assistants can help developers navigate that process using open-source software. She’ll explore assistants and MCP servers that help teams plan projects, annotate data, develop rules, train models, and build modular NLP systems that are small, fast, and fully data-private. At the centre of the talk is a powerful idea: use LLMs to help build the system, instead of making the LLM the entire system. Building Effective AI Agents Without the Framework Hangover, Hugo Bowne-Anderson, Vanishing Gradients AI FOMO is real, and agent frameworks are very good at convincing you that every new feature is mandatory. You ain’t gonna need most of it. Hugo will break down the practical harness around an AI agent: the loop, tools, state, memory, context, traces, and feedback that turn an LLM call into something useful. We’ll look at why agent projects get buried under complexity, why you probably aren’t building Claude Code, and how to make something that works for your users before copying every decision from a general-purpose coding agent. ⚡ Lightning Talks Show us what you’ve built. We’ll open the floor for five-minute lightning demos covering tools, workflows, prototypes, experiments, and wonderfully unfinished things. Then we’ll stick around to chat and trade ideas. If you’d like to give a lightning talk, get in touch.