Back from IPC 2026 and still buzzing about a few of the talks. Quick rundown for anyone who couldn’t make it.

The AI thread ran through a lot of the program, but in a useful way, not a hype way.

Mike Lehan’s Refactoring Robots made the case for handing LLMs the code none of us want to touch. Deprecated methods, bloated classes, the stuff that rots quietly. Real examples, Claude Code on screen, and a sane workflow: plan the refactor, set your checks, let deterministic tools do the verifying. Let the robot do the boring parts.

Frank Berger’s AI Driven Contextual Search in PHP was the one that genuinely surprised me. Semantic search over your own content with embeddings, Redis and a bit of PHP. I had no idea Redis could do this, and I had no idea it was this approachable. Great explanation of the fundamentals.

Paul Conroy showed up twice and nailed both. Everything Is Showbiz is the story of a weekend hack to make a podcast searchable that snowballed into a real transcript engine with semantic search. GPU transcription jobs, cleaning up misheard (and possibly libellous) phrases, making AI output you can trust, all on a side-project budget. I’m stealing the idea for one of my own favourite podcasts.

His second one, Modern PHP Features You’re Probably Not Using, covered ground I already knew. Didn’t matter. The delivery was that good. Union types, readonly classes, cleaner control flow, smarter typing, with before/after code throughout. If you’re still writing PHP 8 with a 7.x brain, watch the recording.

On performance, Volker Dusch’s PHP Performance Demystified is a must-see. He works at Tideways, so the man knows bottlenecks. OPCodes, the VM, reliable benchmarks, profiling tools you can actually use day to day.

Paul Dragoonis’s From Runtime to Resilience wins the chaos award, and I mean that fondly. The demos were a rollercoaster. The knowledge underneath was solid: PHP-FPM tips and tweaks, tuning configs, measuring with OpenMetrics, Grafana and k6.

Sebastian Bergmann’s Turbo-Charging Your PHPUnit Suite delivered exactly what it promised. Almost an hour of practical tips, and one of them handed me a fix for a problem my team has been chewing on for some time.

And the Why We (Still) Need Clean Code session deserves its own paragraph. The recording belongs in the dictionary next to “clean code.” Before-and-after samples, three principles, no fluff.

If I had to pick: Frank Berger for the “wait, that’s it?” moment, Sebastian Bergmann for immediate payoff, and both talks from Paul Conroy for sheer delivery.

And no one fell asleep during my own talk on FrankenPHP, so I’m calling it a Great Success.