Hear me out. At some point in the future there will be no software development conferences. Well, there will be, but virtual ones, attended only by AI coding agents. The entire conference might last only seconds or milliseconds, might be coordinated by themselves, these agents. Might not be even yearly, because they won't care about yearly seasonaility. They might schedule it at their own accord. They might develop their own protocols to exchange all the "presentations" and questions and answers as efficiently as possible. Maybe a follow up conference could be scheduled just a few milliseconds later. or a few human years later...

But...

RAM prices. These will be virtual meetings on some cloud infrastructure. Renting the computing resources to hold these meetings, even if only for seconds or milliseconds, will end up costing a lot. In fact even more than renting real state in hotels for 3-5 days, and sending humans or some agentic robot there with conference ticket and travel expenses and all.

So eventually, full circle. AI software developer agents will use humans as proxies, and "physical" software development conferences will eventually come back, if only just to save money ;)