This paragraph hit home with me as well. I work at a large tech company that's a household name and the practice of using AI to pad out design documents has become totally out of control over the last 4 or 5 months. Writing documentation is arduous and a little painful, which as it turns out is a good thing as it incentivizes the writer to be as succinct as possible. Why the fuck should I -- along with five other engineers -- bother to read and review your design if you didn't even bother to write it?

I work under the assumption that the primary audience of everything I write at work is an AI. Managers will take what I send and have it summarized and evaluated by some chatbot or agent. (Of course, I cannot send them the summary myself.)

So like ATS checkers for resumes, I find myself needing an AI checker for my text.

Ultimately, we will have AI write everything for another AI to parse, which will be a massive waste of energy. If only there was some agreed-upon set of rules, structures, standards, and procedures to facilitate a more efficient communication...

> Requirements documents that were once a page are now twelve.

man I see this on Jira a PM or BA is like "yeah I'll write that AC for you" giant bullet list filled in a bunch of emojis and checkmarks

> Professional formatting, length, and clear prose are no longer indicators of care and work quality (they never were, but in the past, if someone drafts up a twelve page spec, at least you know they care enough to spend a lot of time on it).

I feel the loss of this signal acutely. It’s an adjustment to react to 10-30 page “spec” choc-a-block with formatting and ascii figures as if it were a verbal spitball … because these days it likely is.

I wish cultural norms around documentation would shift to "pull" rather than "push" — generating "views" of organized knowledge on the fly instead of making endless rearrangements of the same information. It's become too cheap in terms of proof of (mental) work to spray endless pages of notes, reports, memos, decks, etc. but the "documentation is good" paradigm hasn't caught up yet.

Ideally AI would minimize excessive documentation. "Core knowledge" (first principles, human intent, tribal knowledge, data illegible to AI systems) would be documented by humans, while AI would be used to derive everything downstream (e.g. weekly progress updates, changelogs). But the temptation to use AI to pad that core knowledge is too pervasive, like all the meaningless LLM-generated fluff all too common in emails these days.

I work for an "AI-native" company now and have found this to be the case.

EVERYONE (engineers, pms, managers, sales) uses Claude Code to read and write Google Docs (google workspace mcp). Ideas, designs, reports. It's too much for one person to read and, with a distributed async team, there's an endless demand for more.

So for every project there's always one super Google Doc with 50 tabs and everyone just points their claude code at it to answer questions. It's not to be read by a human, it's just context for the agent.

> The "elongation" of workplace artifacts resonated with me on such deep level

Well put. I generally skip AI-generated PR descriptions for this reason as they tend to miss the forest for the trees. Sometimes a large change can be explained by a short yet information-rich description ("migrate to use X instead of Y", "Implement F using pattern P") that only a human could and should write.

the product of llms being trained on SEO fluff articles that pad out everything so they get as high in the results as possible

I just don’t read this crap. The problem solves itself since anyone sending me that isn’t going to bother to follow up about it anyway.

This had me crack up!

I used to have a colleague (senior engineer) who never cared to write a single line in Pull Request descriptions, as if other people had to magically know what he meant to achieve with such changes.

Now? His PRs have a full page description with "bulleted summaries of bulleted summaries"!

Well, in many layers of overhead in companies people operate at the level of high schoolers, so it is no surprise unfortunately, that the output comes across like that too.

> Reminded me of when I had to be extra wordy to meet the 1000 minimum word limit for my high school essays.

Minimum word lengths are the greatest dis-service high school and college have ever done to future communication skills. It takes years for people to unlearn this in the workplace.

Max word counts only please. Especially now with AI making it so easy to produce fluff with no signal.

it was only after I had to manage others that I realized the logic for a lot of these simplistic metrics and rules. they are in place to hold accountable the worst performers. a simple example is when i introduced flexible work hours. it was fine with most people, but there are always a few members that abuse the system. they stretch it to the very limit to what can be interpreted as "flexible". as a manager it posed a dilemma for me. i didn't want to take away this privilege just because of a few abusers, but it was both unfair and set bad precedents if I allowed them to get away with this. and let's say they couldn't be easily fired. most of my peers simply ended up going back to a system where people punched in and out.

I remember my first semester university writing class, when on the first day the teacher told us we had learned to pad our writing in high school, and now we were going to learn how to be short and concise because every assignment would be limited to one page.

This is happening at my place as well. I am a senior leader, but I find it hard to push back on this. I something looks plausible and everyone has reacted with a thumbs up (but probably only skimmed the document), when is the first one saying “what is this shit?”

The length itself is not an indicator per se, but you can sense when it is not honest. If others do not have a sense for it, it seems like complaining about something new.

> Reminded me of when I had to be extra wordy to meet the 1000 minimum word limit for my high school essays.

A huge AI signal to me is not em dashes, not emoji, not even the "not X, it's Y" construction which oh god I'm falling into the trap right now aren't I.

It's a combination of these factors plus a tendency to fluff out the piece with punchy but vague language, often recapitulating the same points in slightly reworded ways, that sounds like... an eighth grader trying to write an impressive-sounding essay that clears the minimum word limit.

Did the bright sparks who trained these things just crack open the printer paper boxes in their parents' homes filled with their old schoolwork, and feed that into the machine to get it started?

it actually insane that this sort of thing is tolerated. Its a culture thing and frankly just rude. My org is pretty AI-pilled and this type of behavior will just not fly. I need to be assured im talking to a human who is using their brain.

Since we're all so trusting of AI, maybe we can use AI to score how "excessively wordy" communications are, and pressure people to stop.

In my experience I'm pasting a lot more into AI to get the high level summary though.

Whenever I see a document with horizontal rules between headers and the blues and purples that Claude Cowork adds to .docx files, I sigh.

>>The "elongation" of workplace artifacts resonated with me on such deep level.

Bulk of pretty much every thing is fluff. Not just work place artifacts.

In many ways this is the root of all complexity.

“Anything more than the truth would be too much.”

- Robert Frost