Weeknotes for the week finishing Friday, 17th April 2026.

This week, I:

The human voice

Giles suspects that people are positive about LLMs when they’re using them to replace other people’s professions. He suspects that people are less positive about LLMs when other people are using LLMs to replace their profession.

I agree, but I’d argue that how a person feels about LLMs relates to more than their profession.

An example. I’m positive about using LLMs for writing Lua and Vimscript. I am not a Lua and Vimscript software developer. LLMs save me time; they help me do something I don’t want to do, but do want the results of doing.

I’m less positive about using LLMs for writing Python. I am a Python software developer. I’ve spent 12 years developing my knowledge, experience, and skill. Several inches of my bookshelf are occupied by the first and second editions of Fluent Python. I’ve spent weekends at Python conferences and enjoyed them. I will enjoy talking to you about my preference for collections.namedtuple over @dataclasses.dataclass, even if you won’t enjoy listening to me.

Yes, how I feel about LLMs relates to my profession. But more than my profession, it relates to my identity.

Ways of working

I’ve always worked in small software development teams, for small-to-medium-sized companies. I’ve taken it for granted that everyone signed up to the agile manifesto. Recently, I’ve encountered other ways of working; ways of working that involve meetings, gantt charts, work plans, and KPIs. These are not my ways of working.