My (Sketch)notes from Code Camp Wellington 2026

Think small: How to maintain a startup mindset even after 20+ years – Chris Smith

• Lesson 1: small is good
• Lesson 2: Embrace your inner Anarchist
• Lesson 3: Surround yourself with geniuses
• Lesson 4: Keep your culture alive
• Lesson 5: It’s about people

Data wrangling with AI – Daniel Shannon

• Have secure custom deployed models, an air gap
• Use continuous QA agents
• Map together disparate data sets
• The most important thing: high quality data set

Running Runn on a run: Hands free vibe coding – Ingo Schommer

• “From writing code to having conversations about code”
• Agents work better when you get your accessibility right
• Two stage loop, two LLMs
  • Sandbox around Claude Code
  • Many hilarious edge cases

New Normal: AI Speed, Human Overload – Lexi Weng

• Ship more, close more tickets, but increased mental load, more context-switching, less satisfaction
• Waiting for a prompt response, or an agent, is not a rest
• It moves effort, we do more in parallel
• The productivity baseline has gone up
• Becoming orchestrator more than creator

How I took a career break – Prae Songprasit

• If you have an Employee Assistance Programme, use it!
• Things that lower morale, path to burnout
  • Mismatched skills and team needs
  • Devaued specialist skis
  • Values mismatch
• What do you
  • care about?
  • get satisfaction from?
• Rest is not wasting time
• Become clear on your burnout conditions, your red flags
  • For example: tired, teary, terse
• Know thyself and monitor

Pragmatic GenAI for Software Developers: Staying Human in the Loop – Roberto Allende

• Be Deliberate rather than be reactive
  • Act with agency
• An LLM is a probability machine that gives us plausible answer
  • When we give it vague inputs it has a large probability space
• Automation has to be deterministic: the same inputs give the same outputs, every time
• It feels magical until it collapses
• LLMs can give genuine leverage when generating options
• Review AI output like an untrustworthy Pull Request

The Habits of Fast Developers – Sam Jarman

• Increase the density of your experience
• Good habits and bad habits both stack
• Understand the big picture
• Have the option to reverse things
• Bookmark everything
• Experience = Sensations + Reflection