The Em Dash | AI Engineering Meetup
LLM + REPL = Actually Useful?
Thursday, October 23 · 6:00 PM - 8:00 PM
This session explores how pairing Large Language Models (LLMs) with REPL-driven development can transform them from brittle code generators into reliable engineering partners.
Featuring Joe R. Smith, Co-founder/CEO of Doomsun (formerly Cognitect, Nubank, Crescent) — with 20+ years in distributed systems, decision engines, and functional programming.
Expect hard truths, practical insights, and a live demo. Whether you’re a researcher, engineer, or AI enthusiast, you’ll walk away with a clearer sense of what it takes to make LLMs actually useful.
In Collaboration With
About
What is The Em Dash?
The Em Dash is a monthly gathering of Baton Rouge’s most curious AI builders—engineers, researchers, and tinkerers who care about getting AI into the real world. We talk retrieval pipelines, prompt tuning, agent workflows, evals, trust layers, edge deployment—whatever’s actually being built.
No over-polished hype. No hand-wavy magic.
Just honest tech talk, live demos, architecture breakdowns, and the shared effort of figuring out how to make AI do something useful.
Organized by Obney AI.
- September 25th, 2025 – Vibe Coding in Production
- August 28th, 2025 – Turn Your iPhone into a 3D Scanner with DINOv3 + VGGSfM
- July 31st, 2025 – Stop prompting and start programming models with DSPy
- June 26th, 2025 – Pulse Check
