2026 Week 9

This weekly wrap up is a little later than planned. I ended last week absolutely exhausted. A combination Zoom fatigue at work, coupled with more screen time than usual left me feeling drained. Come Sunday night I took stock; behind on admin, behind on prep for next week, behind on sleep.

It wasn’t all a bad week though. Notable highlights include a curriculum evening at Oscar’s school, rediscovering old toys in with Ethan, wrapping my head around Claude Code and of course the weather. With nonstop rain in 2026 it has been a delight to have a couple of days of glorious sunshine.

When it comes to education, the curriculum is the curriculum. I’d never really given it much thought. I’ve trusted that the meddling of successive governments in the education system has only made minor changes. It is hard to make sweeping changes to any system at a national level. So when Oscar’s school started to talk about doing something different with GCSEs, my interest grew. I don’t have anything against GCSEs specifically, but I do feel children are subject to too much testing. Oscar was six months old when I was shown an assessment that rated his IT skills. The school is still working through what they are going to do, but I think the phrasing of the question they’ve asked is what excites me the most. If we didn’t have to prepare children for GCSEs, what else would we do with the time?

Ethan and I raided the games cupboard over the weekend; Tiddlywinks, puzzles, Spirograph, and then we found the box of paints. Ethan painted so hard with black water that he wore through the paper and began painting the table. I had great fun with stronger, brighter colours.

Oscar and I have been exploring the idea of building a beat sequencer out of Lego. It’s just an idea at this point but we’ve been tinkering with various mechanisms to see how feasible it is. The idea is to spin shapes on a turntable. As each vertex passes a sensor it can be either on or off. On plays a drum, off is a rest. The aim would be to try different shapes and different combinations of on/off for each vertex.

It won’t be a secret to many of you, but I’m not the greatest fan of the AI hype being peddled at the moment. In many conversations about the topic I’m acutely aware that I can come across as anti-AI. I’m not. I’m just not an AI maximalist and don’t believe it will replace humanity. I do believe the current hype will have consequences though. In an effort to ensure that I have some understanding and appreciation for the technology, I’ve been experimenting. This week I had Claude Code writing code for me while I do my best to fake it as a product manager. I had fun, the tools are impressive, but I have serious reservations about the leap to cross industry mass unemployment that people are predicting. If anything, I have more questions than answers. What, if anything, should we be teaching children about these technologies? What can we do to avoid an AI tax being paid to a small handful of private organisations? There is so much more that humans offer to society than just generating output, what can we do to increase awareness of this? If employers and managers don’t employees as more than just output generators then I don’t think it is AI that will be the death of employment as we know it, it will be something more fundamental. The desire to take from a system without considering or compensating for the harms caused is rampant. AI plays right into this desire.