> She genuinely seemed to think she's helping me by spending 15 seconds typing in a prompt and having me spend the next 30 minutes untangling the AI slop.

This is the root frustration spreading across workplaces everywhere. Before AI the only way for someone to generate a design document, Jira ticket, or pull request without investing a lot of their own time and effort into producing what you saw.

LLMs came along and erased that assumption. Now you don't know if that e-mail, that 12-page design document, the 100 or 1000 line PR, or those 10 Jira tickets were written by someone who invested a lot of their own time into producing something, or if they had their AI subscription generate something that looked plausible. You have to actually read and process the work, which takes 100 times more effort than it took them to make it.

For people in the working world who saw the workplace as a game of min-maxing their effort against the appearance of being a valuable contributor, LLMs are the perfect shortcut: They can now generate the appearance of doing a lot of work with no more than a few lines of asking an LLM to produce documents.

If anyone spends the 30 minutes to review the AI slop from their 15-second prompt, they'll copy your feedback into ChatGPT and send another document over with the fixes. Now they've even captured you into doing their work for them!

For teams or even entire companies that were relying on appearances of activity as a proxy for contributions, this is going to be a difficult transition. Everyone e-mail job worker in the world just received a tool that will generate the appearance of doing their job for them and even possibly be plausibly correct most of the time. One person can generate volumes of design documents, Jira tickets, and even copy and paste witty responses into the company Slack and appear to be the most engaged and dedicated employee by volume while doing less actual work than ever before.

I think teams that already had good review cultures with managers who cared about the output rather than the metrics are doing fine because anyone even a little bit engaged can spot the AI copy-and-paste employees with even a little inspection. The lazy managers who relied on skimming documents and plotting number of PRs or lines of code changed are in for a rude awakening when they discover the employees dominating their little games are the ones doing the most damage to the team.