Weeknote #82 (20260419-20260425)

meta

Spent Sunday through Friday in Austin, for work. It was mostly fine, but the weather was kinda meh, and I didn’t manage to get much of anywhere beyond work and hotel. I think next time I’m going to stay downtown and tolerate the time lost to commuting, because at least that way I can get out in the evening and walk around a bit.

did

  • Sunday: got up too early, drove up to PDX, and then flew down to Austin
  • Monday-Friday: work work work. Flew home Friday late afternoon, finally got home around 10pm
  • Saturday: got a massage in the morning, then TheWife and I got some empanadas for lunch. I swung by the local in the afternoon for a couple beers, then picked up some sausages to grill for dinner. Watched the Timbers snatch a surprising three points from San Diego, then grilled, ate, and went to bed.
  • Noting for posterity: I think this might be the first weeknote done from a plane…

read

  • Finished Labyrinth Index; started Dead Lies Dreaming. Also finally picked up Lessons In Service again

  • “I used AI. It worked. I hated it.”

    You’ve certainly seen it linked; you’ve probably read it, but if not: check it out.

    There’s a fundamental problem with these tools beyond the capacity of any deployment strategy to solve: the tool requires expertise to validate, but its use diminishes expertise and stunts its growth. How does one become an expert? There are no shortcuts; there is only continuous hard work and dedication. I was once told of writing, great writers learn how to break the rules in new and ingenious ways by first learning the rules.

    But how is a new developer meant to learn the rules if their day-to-day work is nothing but the babysitting of models? How will they gain the hard-won experience that allows a human in the loop to be a useful safeguard?

  • “The AI Great Leap Forward” — which you’ve also probably already seen linked and recommended ALL over the place — is indeed fantastic. No pull quotes, it would ruin it — just go read it

  • “Let’s talk about LLMs”

    Fucking PREACH ON, brother

    As for what you should be doing instead of rushing to adopt LLM coding out of fear that you’ll be left behind: I think you should be listening to what all those whitepapers and reports and studies are actually telling you, and working on fundamentals. You should be adopting and perfecting solid foundational software development practices like version control, comprehensive test suites, continuous integration, meaningful documentation, fast feedback cycles, iterative development, focus on users, small batches of work… things that have been known and proven for decades, but are still far too rare in actual real-world software shops.

  • “Anarchy at Work” says quite a bit that resonates with the Agile is Anarchy series of posts:

    An effective anarchism at work will begin and end with care. Care for co-workers, care for the people who use the things you make, perhaps care for the work itself but that’s certainly the lowest priority of the three.

  • “The Courage to Stop”

    Maybe an ironic link, given the amount of stuff I’m gonna have in this weeknote, but this one hit pretty hard:

    Brevity was always a discipline. Now it’s a statement. When everything around you is excessive by default, choosing fewer words takes courage. It says: I thought about this. I edited. I respected your time more than I needed to show my work.

  • “AI Use Appears to Have a ‘Boiling Frog’ Effect on Human Cognition, New Study Warns”

    Big caveat: this is a summary of a not-yet-peer-reviewed paper, so apply an appropriately-sized salt grain:

    “If sustained AI use erodes the motivation and persistence that drive long-term learning, these effects will accumulate over years, and by the time they are visible, they will be difficult to reverse,” the study urges. “This is analogous to the ‘boiling frog’ effect, where each incremental act feels costless, until the cumulative effect becomes overwhelming to address.”

  • current bookmark count: 196

looking forward to

Next week I’ll be in the Bay Area, again for work. I’m looking forward to coming back home and staying there for longer than 36 hours…xFIXME something coming up