Rust NYC w/Bryan Cantrill - Code Matters: Reflections on Rust in the LLM Age

Join us on **Thursday, October 22nd at our sponsor Datadog**. Doors open at 6:30 p.m. to give attendees plenty of time to grab pizza and socialize, and the talk begins at 7:15 p.m. Fresh off the back of his RustConf 2026 keynote, we are incredibly privileged to be joined by the Co-Founder and CTO of Oxide Computer Company: Bryan Cantrill. After learning more about the power of the Rust NYC community earlier this year, Bryan has very kindly donated his time to fly over to New York to share more with the community, and he will be doing a special one-off hour long keynote to discuss the future of Rust in the LLM age. **Code Matters: Reflections on Rust in the LLM age** Perhaps the most profound revolution with Rust is its shift of cognitive load from the operation of software systems to their development: Rust asks more of software engineers, but in return offers a much better artifact -- and specifically one that reduces emergent misbehavior in production. A surprising ramification of this shift is that Rust itself is highly amenable to LLM use -- and in fact so much so that some loudmouthed Rust newcomers have brashly claimed that they refuse to so much as look at the Rust code that their LLM generates. In this talk, we will reflect on Rust in the LLM age. We will discuss how we can use LLMs to increase our rigor, while still retaining our responsibility for the code that we generate. And yes, why -- despite brassy bravado to the contrary -- the code very much still matters.