I like Knuth's take. Personally I do it to signal, "I'm looking to work with people on this". Some of my hobby projects consequently have notes from my perspect

I like Knuth's take. Personally I do it to signal, "I'm looking to work with people on this". Some of my hobby projects consequently have notes from my perspective which read as more journalesque. I agree with OP, this interpretation is reading a bit much into code comments without asking a single programmer the norms of programming.