The 2025 New Zealand Research Software Engineering Conference was held on September 23-24th. It has run for almost a decade, starting in 2016 as the CRI Coding Conference before becoming the Science Coding Conference, a title it kept until 2020, when it became the Research Software Engineering Conference. Throughout this time, it has focused on science and engineering, high performance computing, and cloud computing and is aimed at various coders, sysadmins, software engineers, data analysts, and IT managers from public research institutions and has the endorsement of the RSE Association of Australia and New Zealand.

As the programme indicates, this year's selection of presentations and BoFs has a strong emphasis on machine learning and developments in artificial intelligence. This was evident right from the very start with Nick Jones' keynote address on the first day, and with numerous presentations throughout the conference. A concern must be raised when this pivot to AI/ML involves a recursive comparative testing being conducted with other AI/ML systems. Ultimately, the validity of computational modelling must come not only from the quality of the inputs but the real-world predictive (and hindcasting) value of the outputs.

Thankfully, there was little in the way of "AI/ML marketing hype" at this conference, which really was firmly dedicated to actual computational practice, development of skills and knowledge, and research outputs. Further, there was only a moderate amount of theory, and that's primarily for foundations, as it should be. Being in Aotearoa New Zealand, it is perhaps unsurprising that there were several presentations on Earth sciences, but also of note was the emphasis on climatology, oceanography, and new developments in forensics.

Interestingly, Australian research software development and education were present in a number of presentations, including speakers from WEHI and CSIRO. From Research Computing Services at the University of Melbourne received a surprising highlight with my own presentation, "Programming Principles in a High Performance Computing Environment", the first presentation of the conference and Daniel Tosello's "VSCode on the node" being the third. It bodes well for current and future Trans-Tasman collaboration.

Finally, the Research Software Engineering New Zealand Conference included a small number of explicit community-building presentations. In conferences such as these, presentations are often of a special interes,t but with a much wider and latent feature being the awareness of the directions that other institutions and individuals are taking and the strength of professional connections, a critical requirement not only for an individual's development, but also for raising the collective knowledge of the institutions that they belong to.