LLMs are just pushed by everyone at us, people just can't stand hearing about it anymore even if they use it and find it helpful.
It's like at PyCon2026 the keynote was about LLM, and people were just leaving in the middle, including GvR.
BUILD 2026 is happening next week and from the agenda I already seen it is worthless to spend any time looking at its sessions, other than probably what Mark Russinovich has to tell about Azure, almost everything else is AI.
It's hard to avoid the topic when it literally redefines what it means to create software. If I'm using it to create some piece of software, then I turn around and say "I wrote this" am I even being truthful? But if I'm trying to avoid mentioning LLMs what other wording could I use?
> It's hard to avoid the topic when it literally redefines what it means to create software.
Say that the IDE also "redefined what it meant to create software" when it entered the ecosystem as an idea and product, does that mean every conversation, community meetup and thinking needs to consider the IDEs now? Probably not, then there is no more room for the other topics anymore.
You could say it's more akin to if we have all been writing in a assembly and suddenly we got access to compilers and high level languages. Would we all be complaining that every conference is "about compilers"?
Classically, this is when a large-sized BOF conference might form an “editors” committee, delegate the entire topic to it, and ask the committee to elect one presentation each day that the committee feels would be valued by the conference as a whole. It maintains the enthusiasm for those who truly value discussing that subtopic in detail, and it’s an effective tool for keeping evangelism and/or holy wars within a given group sect from sucking all the air out of the room for everyone else. (Modernily, subreddits are an expression of that exact same model, and remarkably effective at scale for that purpose.)
This is a meetup for Zig the tool, so you would need to identify how you are interested in Zig to attend and not run into problems.
“I want to [verb] with Zig someday and want to show up and listen and learn”
“I [verb] with Zig and have formed opinions and want to swap them with others”
“I [verb] with Zig and have not yet formed opinions”
If you can’t identify a verb for such a sentence, then you probably need to gain some vague clarity on why you’re considering attending.
But if your sentences are all “I [verb] with LLM”, then there’s no point in attending a Zig meetup; attend an LLM meetup instead. “I [verb] with LLM and the LLM [verbs] with Zig” isn’t transitive to “I [verb] with Zig using LLM” in human social relations; that difference matters, even though a logical evaluation would claim that ( A & B ) & ( B & C ) = A & C. People are extremely sensitive to the difference and Zig has labeled their events as A & B, not A & C.
Specific example: “I code with LLM […] in Zig” would be offtopic, because there’s no human verb-use of Zig present; the verb “code” is bound to LLM, not to Zig, and so is not a valid basis for human connection over a shared interest in Zig.
Specific example: “I write out Zig programs on paper first” would be ontopic, but “I write Zig with pencils rather than pens” would be offtopic; even though both refer to the same activity, one is about how you perform a creative act within your self to output Zig, the other is best reserved for a stationery BOF.
(This holds true for all “I [verb] with [noun]” BOFs and is a good general principle for when to, and when not to, bring up LLMs at a Noun event. You can swap also “LLMs” for “employees” and get the same outcome: don’t go to a Noun BOF to talk about managing Noun workers; instead, go to a Managers BOF to talk about Verbing.)
