Hello all!
Our latest San Diego C++ Meetup took place on Tuesday, November 18th, 2025. This was the 80th meeting of our group!
It was a slightly shorter session than usual as I’ve been quite busy, but we managed to pack in some great discussions on Agentic AI, review some fascinating C++ news/blogs, and solve a tricky quiz.
A huge thank you to JetBrains for their continued sponsorship of our meetup group! Their support allows us to keep this community going.
Thank you Packt for providing coupons for the upcoming seminar by Patrice!
The meeting event page can be found here.
The Main Topic: Agentic AI and C++
I spent some time sharing my personal experience over the last nine months working with Agentic AI (specifically using tools like Cursor and Cloud Code).
We discussed how this is changing the way we write, document, and interact with code. My experience has been overwhelmingly positive—bordering on “science fiction” at times. We talked about the shift in workflow: writing less code manually but spending more time “planning” with the model and verifying the output.
Key takeaways discussed:
- Planning is crucial: Spending time brainstorming and writing a “spec” (often in Markdown) with the AI before generating code leads to much better results.
- Verification: You end up reading more code than you write. It is essential to understand what the AI generated to avoid technical debt.
- Skillset Shift: Learning to interact with these models is a skill developers should start building now.
Links & Discussion Points
We reviewed several interesting articles and resources during the session:
- Undo Agentic Debugging: We looked at a poster from CppCon regarding “Agentic Debugging”—using AI to explain backtraces or reverse-debugged states in plain English.
- Free Functions Performance: An interesting analysis on whether free functions are faster than member functions. The conclusion? Generally, no difference, unless the this pointer push overhead is significant in very tight loops.
- C++20 Concepts & Forward Declaration: A fascinating edge case blog post by Andreas Fertig. It explores how a forward-declared type interacts with Concepts and auto vs void return types.
- Conan & Sanitizers: We discussed how to properly integrate sanitizers into your Conan 2.0 profiles.
- C++26 Reflection: We touched on the massive potential of C++26 Reflection.
- Daniel Lemire on automated equality checks: Automated Equality Checks in C++ with Reflection
- Herb Sutter on CppCast: Herb mentioned that if we had Reflection earlier, AI development might have been 2 years ahead by allowing C++ to be used more easily instead of Python/DSLs. Reflection and C++26 with Herb Sutter
- GenAI Skepticism/Pragmatism: Two posts by Kevlin Henney on the importance of thinking for yourself when using LLMs.
C++ Quiz
We tackled CppQuiz Question #400.
- Topic discussed: Threads, std::jthread, and sequencing.
- The Question: Does the increment of a non-atomic variable across threads cause a race condition or undefined behavior in this specific snippet?
- The Answer: It outputs 2.
- Why? The standard guarantees specific “happens-before” relationships between thread construction, lambda execution, and join(), ensuring a well-defined sequence of operations even without explicit atomics in this specific case.
Recording
For the full discussion, check out the recording on YouTube:
If you are in the San Diego area, feel free to reach out on Discord! I still have a few printed books to give away.
Thank you!
Kobi
tags: [C++, Meetup, San Diego, AI, Reflection, Conan]
