Presentation-first judging has been a thing for a long time, and unless there is a organizing party that explicitly makes code reviews a part of the scoring, and the organizers ensure attendance quotas for different personas (engineer vs. product vs. designer) it will always drift that way.

The only ones I've seen switch to 3.1 Flash Lite were from 2.5 Flash Lite, and all for the most simple use cases, e.g. small UX enhancements.

Or Google. I'm working with multiple customers right now that are very pissed at Google for deprecating Gemini 2.5 Flash, canning the GA release of 3.0 Flash and now have to decide whether to bite the bullet of the 5x price increase for 3.5 Flash or switching providers. Quite a few of them will likely fully pivot to open models.

- I think the comparison to TCP/DNS/BGP is the more apt one compared to MCP/A2A

- Those protocols negotiate capabilities and exchange information about themselves, but not in a self-serving manner of just talking about themselves, but with the goal of ultimately transporting data for a higher layer. Ask Protocol lacks that.

- Objects don't exist in a vacuum, but in a context. As the objects will only know about themselves they will always be limited in how to describe themselves best. An LLM that lives on the outside and just gets a static description of an object will be in a much better description to answer an "ask" query.

- Given that the existing agent protocols you are putting it in a context in already come with "description" fields and the like, the protocol seems too little of a value add to actually target. e.g. there is no benefit for a MCP server to conform to the prescribed manifest rather than implementing a freeform "ask" tool.

- If you want to actually bring the point across that it "occupies a different position" than transport/agent protocols, don't put it into a comparison matrix where you force it into the same schema

- ("Open Source" doesn't count as governance)

MCP servers on the side of the consuming organizations fit into the existing IT landscape, with centralized safeguard on who can access what a lot better and are easier to administer than letting their employees run arbitrary agents against arbitrary sources and destinations and cause chaos.

Last year the government launched an goverment owned alternative "myGov" and now has to claw back market share, which I don't see working out.

With things happening in general, and with Bun's LLM-aided move away from Zig in particular, there is bound to be some interest in talking about LLMs and how that impacts Zig's future.

I think this was a well measured "hey, let's focus on thing we are coming together to celebrate and advance: Zig".

It doesn't have to be sophisticated and they don't need to implement it themselves. They piggy-back on OpenFeature where the client libraries have a simple targeting rule evaluation engine integrated.

With both of those combined they are currently just redistributing wealth to the elderly that have created this mess.

I'm working on an self-hostable LLM (web) UI[0] that aims to provide a comparable good UX to e.g. ChatGPT, and you are right that there is a decent amount of fragility involved, and more management overhead than most people would expect.

However, we usually find that those details happen a lot more in e.g. the harness (= out application), or some prompt tuning that's required for each of the models, rather than model quality itself. We have seen customers using self-hosted LLMs with similar user satisfaction across their organization to other customers that heavily lean on latest GPT-5 models on Azure. Especially given that you have to do some level of tuning and setup anyways, you might as well invest it in "local"/self-hosted AI (if you can make the financials of the inference cost work out for you).

I think it should also be noted that the inference providers on hyperscalers also tend to be quite fragile, each in their own way (e.g. Google with a horrible rate limit system or Azure with almost weekly intermittent 500-error incidents).

[0]: https://github.com/EratoLab/erato

At this point I'm not even sure if it can properly create a simple primitive solid.