🤠🤖 Nobody Will Think You Ain't From Houston 🤖🤠
September 29, 2026 — cybrseccon, cybrhakcon, ai village, agentic-ai, bsides, houston, community, conference, recap
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Nobody Will Think You Ain’t From Houston
Two days running an AI village at CYBR.SEC.CON, a BSides that came back to the city after five years, and the best t-shirt anybody has ever handed me.
I got home from Houston with a coffee cup, a puzzle, a 3D printed BSides badge, a copy of Winn Schwartau’s Analogue Network Security, a free newspaper from each of the two cons, and a t-shirt that a Lyft driver gave me on the ride in from the airport. The t-shirt is the one I keep picking back up.
This is the Houston post. Two days of running an AI village at a conference I had never been to, a BSides that came back to the city after a five year gap, and a pile of conversations I am still turning over. The two talks I gave get their own posts, because they deserve the room to go technical. This one is about the room, the people, and the shirt.
The ride in from the airport
My first Lyft driver in Houston got one of the best conversations of the whole trip out of me.
We did the usual what brings you to town. I told him about the cybersecurity conference, that I had been flown out and put up in a hotel so I could present my research and run demos. He gassed me up about that for a bit, and then let me know that he and his friends had been using AI to help develop some side hustles. His hustle was selling t-shirts. At the end of the ride he handed me one, free, and said, in his own words, “if you wear that, nobody will think you ain’t from Houston.” I was happy to give extra than normal on the tip.
The shirt is pretty dang cool in the most Houston of ways, and I can say without a doubt that I own nothing else like it. Does the giant cone shaped curb feeler on the low rider start behind the good looking cowgirl and then extend in front of her muscular thigh? Yes. Does it look like cowboys are running away from a strange looking giant bird in the background? Yes. Do I know what “77 wayz to get paid” or “Land of the trill” means? No. Do I care? Only if by “care” you mean I think it is even more awesome.
A perfect souvenir for remembering both Houston and the fact that I went there to present my own AI systems and methodology. Everything else I carried home is great. The shirt won.
The name that tripped a few people up
This one is worth getting straight, because it caught people at the con too.
The event was CYBR.SEC.CON. Inside it, AI.SEC.CON ran as its own track, focused primarily on securing AI and on blue team AI tooling. What my team and I ran was the CYBR.HAK.CON AI Village, which sat at the practitioner level: creating AI systems, and using those systems in offensive operations. Three similar names, three different things. If you were there and the signage got you, you were not the only one.
The building
George R. Brown Convention Center is absolutely massive, and saying massive does not do the scale justice.
On the third floor, across the hall from our room, you walk up to what looks like a door to another conference room and you open it into an entire multi-story theater with stadium seating. There were AV operators running over a dozen active conference rooms at the same time. Shout out to Diego.
The room we built
Our room was much larger than the last village room I helped run, and we organized it in two halves.
One half had round tables and power strips so people could sit down and work on their own projects. The other half had rows of chairs facing a podium and a very large TV. We set our tables up in one corner with a monitor showing a demo and Rabid’s AI assistant on a laptop, both facing outward so anybody walking past could reach them without asking permission.
HaxrByte built a hacking-an-LLM lab. RabidVermin had the virtual AI assistant running on that laptop to answer whatever anyone wanted to throw at it. I had my swarms in a cage demo up on the monitor for people to interact with. We invited anyone else working on an AI project to bring it and set up next to us.
The speaking side of the village ran on handles. thule opened the first day with Tokens All the Way Down and came back later with GARBAGE IN, CONFIDENTLY OUT. rabidvermin gave Uncensored and Offline. haxrbyte gave Your AI Assistant Trusts Everyone and then Trust Remote Code: Six Ways to Ship. I had the Tuesday afternoon slot, and a second one the next morning.
What I liked most was how porous that room turned out to be. Some people wandered in, went straight for the demos, and talked with us at the tables, and the range of what they wanted was wide: basic use of AI, the specific challenges of AI inside their own organization, and then straight off into the esoteric. Some worked on their laptops at the round tables while listening to a presentation. Others drifted in during a talk through the open doors, and I would like to think they heard something through the doorway that made them sit down.
A few things from those two days that I am keeping. Several people came back to listen to my second talk after hearing the first one. Someone let me know that a private chat they had broadcast my talk into had enjoyed it, which was amazing to hear. And someone told me my AI swarms were built “like an artist,” which nearly made me blush.
I will be straight about the scale, the way I have been about every other room. There were 25 to 30 people at most during my talks. We were told afterward that some of our talks may not have made it onto the conference app, and organizers said they want to re-route crowds to some of the rooms more efficiently next time. That is a fixable problem. The people who did find us were the right people, and I got real conversations with almost all of them.
The two talks
Short version here. The deep version lives elsewhere, and that is on purpose.
The first talk, Tuesday afternoon, was Swarms That Fight and Fix Each Other in a Cage. Two swarms built separately, put into a cage together, and run against each other over rounds while everything else was held still, so that a move on the score could actually be attributed to something. It gets into what improved, what did not, and what a cage match can and cannot tell you about a real network.
The second, Wednesday morning, was A Language That Compiles Differently Every Time. That one carries the series of definitions, checks and questions I am happiest with: what separates a mechanism from a practice, why two checks that share a premise cannot audit that premise, and how you would know whether your green is telling you anything at all.
Both have their own posts, linked at the bottom, along with the slides, speaker notes, and the demos.
The newspapers
Here is a detail I did not expect to enjoy as much as I did.
There were literal physical newspapers at these conferences, sitting in traditional newspaper dispensers, free. I kept one from CYBR.SEC.CON and one from CYBR.HAK.CON. The whole event is supposed to be about connecting physically and engaging with each other in a digital landscape, and I very much enjoy that aesthetic.
An extra day for BSides
Rabid and I stayed an extra day to go to BSides Houston, and I am glad we did.
It was the first BSides Houston in over five years, thanks to Christian Gonzalez, also known as Ch0mp4. It was put on in a conference hall attached to a food bank processing facility (it was a nicer space than that makes it sound). Normal intimate size for a community BSides, which is the whole point of the format.
Afterward there was a get-together at a nearby beer garden. I got a book recommendation from Cowboy. I nerded out about agentic AI systems with a CTO who used to work with a close friend of mine, which is a small world moment I did not expect to get halfway across the country. I talked with people who have been speaking at conferences for a long time, and I talked with people just getting into the industry and helped them get their bearings on some fun projects and communities worth being part of. I will always recommend CCDC to anyone.
There were familiar faces and there were new friends to make, in a city I had never been to. That is the argument for BSides in one line. They allow for closer connections inside a smaller geographic region. Go find your local one, and if you happen to be somewhere else at the right time, go to that one instead.
Thank you
The village was a built thing, and other people built most of it.
Thank you to Christian Gonzalez for the invite to BSides Houston and for the excellent talk he gave at the village. His AI hacking training site is AIPWN.me, and it is worth a look. Thank you to CYBR.SEC.CON leadership for putting the whole thing on and for having us. Thank you to the rest of the village team, who ran the room with me for two days and who deserve more credit than a recap can carry. Thank you to thule, rabidvermin, and haxrbyte, for the talks and for the demos that sat next to mine. Thank you to Diego and the AV crew, who kept over a dozen rooms running at once. Thank you to Steven Seagondollar for filming my first talk. Thank you to Cowboy for the book. And thank you to Xage Security for sponsoring, which is a real contribution to a community event and one I appreciate.
Thank you, most of all, to everybody who walked through that pink arch, sat down at a table, and argued through an idea with me. That is the part I came for.
I keep coming back to how small the good moments were. A driver who decided a stranger should own a shirt. A person who came back the next morning because the first talk was worth a second one. A room where the doors stayed open and people wandered in mid-sentence. I flew home with a duffel of souvenirs and a conference app that may not have listed every one of our talks, and I would go back tomorrow.
The talks in detail
Both talks have their own posts, and the slides, speaker notes, and demos are in one repo:
- Swarms That Fight and Fix Each Other in a Cage: the red team against blue team cage, what improved between rounds, and what a cage match cannot tell you about a real network.
- A Language That Compiles Differently Every Time: the definitions, the checks, the questions, and the forever problem underneath all of them.
- github.com/Qweary/ai-village-2026: slides, speaker notes, and the demos from both talks.
The underlying swarm generation framework remains unpublished.