Summarizer

Sure, I agree, but now longer/stuffier things cost half as much as shorter things. In most cases, that cost isn't worth it.

> "Requirements documents that were once a page are now twelve. Status updates that were once three sentences are now bulleted summaries of bulleted summaries. Retrospective notes, post-incident reports, design memos, kickoff decks: every artifact that can be elongated is, by people who do not read what they produce, for readers who do not read what they receive." Great article. The "elongation" of workplace artifacts resonated with me on such deep level. Reminded me of when I had to be extra wordy to meet the 1000 minimum word limit for my high school essays. 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). So now the "productivity-gain bottleneck" is people who still care enough to review manually.

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'm starting to see pushback for this. I know a Product Manager that was fired for padding his documentation with AI to the point there were mistakes and wasted work due to AI hallucinations.

I see it even on my GitHub project, issues and pull request comments get longer, responses get longer, all generated by ai and read by ai. This text is no longer for human consumption, but to provide context to ai.

What I find particularly irritating is that you can actually prompt the fcking AI to be short. > 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. It takes more effort to be brief, even for humans. Good documentation writers were always brief.

> 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.

> 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

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

Yeah that was my guess as well.

> 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.

We need to demand better from our coworkers and from ourself. Young "AI native" coworker opens PRs with 3 screen slop description, I flagged that "I know he ain't reading all that, and therefore I ain't reading all that" , so he should just give a max half-screen overview. I expect that the PR description makes sense, is correct, and have been reviewed by the person opening the PR. You can still use agents for that, but at least there is a chance with shorter descriptions that it's not completely bs.

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.

They likely haven’t read it either, so they’ll never know you didn’t as well.

I just stopped reading my work emails and the announcement channels. Everything that actually matters either ends up DMed to me or shows up in my calendar.

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"!

My colleague had a problem with commit messages, so now they're all written by AI. I don't know what depth of hell he managed to get the prompt from, but they're all now in the format "Updated /path/to/file: fixed issue in thingamabob", which means they're all at least 200 characters long and half of it is the file path, an absolutely pointless thing to put in a commit message. The best part is that whenever you look at GitLab or GitHub, instead of seeing the commit message next to the file you just see the file name again, then the message is cut off.

> 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.

I write the words that I hear in my head, as though I am speaking. With the exception of timed, in-class essays, I always turned in papers far in excess of any minimum during high school. In college, I took a constructive writing course because I thought "Hey, easy A!" After the second or third week, the professor told me that, while the class had a word minimum, I would also be given a separate word maximum . She said I needed to learn brevity and simplicity, before anything else. The point being: I was able to cruise through high school with my longwindedness as a cheat code, never stressing about minimum lengths, despite my writing being crap in other ways. Although I have regressed in the two decades since, it helped me a good deal. I am grateful to that professor for doing that.

I had the opposite issue. Writing was agony and every section would be written, reviewed and rewritten to get my point across; only to be tortured by a miminum word count that was 20% away after saying all i cound think of saying. I've gotten better at phrasing myself adequately in one go. Rute mechanical memorization has also made writing itself cheaper. (read my username) I can now yap quite adequately over text, yet i regularly find AIs at a minimum 2x as verbose as my preferred phrasing after manual word mashing.

It can help to force depth into a topic that requires it, and more expression and emotion into writing where that is of value. It also forces the writer to think more deeply about the topic and organize their thoughts. While I hated it in high school, but think I better understand it now. I think part of the problem is they never explained the "why" or the "how", just the requirement. I wasn't able to write anything more than a page or two without extreme difficultly until college when the requirements went up to 30 pages. In theory, someone who can write a 30 page paper could effectively distill it down to a short memo when needed, summarizing their primary point(s). Someone who can only write short memos would have a hard time writing something longer one day if/when required. I was trying to do a knowledge transfer one day, opened up Word, and just typed 20 pages on everything I knew about a tool we used heavily, but wasn't documented anywhere. I don't think I could have done that before I was forced to write those longer papers in college.

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.

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.

I had a "Violence in the Political System" professor who only assigned executive summary research assignments. No more than one page. His explanation: I don't want to read more than that, and you should be able to fit all the most important details in one page. Great lesson.

> 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?

Well, and Google's proxy read of "quality" might have flawed assumptions. A concise page where you get what you need and leave quickly might read as "high bounce rate".

Bingo but i also think it is just the nature of the technology. It is going to be wordy but not usefully so.

If I paste something from an AI into chat, I always identify it as such by saying something like "my claude instance says this:". I also don't blindly copy paste from it, I always read it first and usually edit it for brevity or tone. Feel like this should be the absolute minimum for sending AI content to a person.

I see it as rude as well. The literal interpretation is: "your time is worth absolutely nothing to me."

And they are generating the longer version with AI, that you are then using AI to summarize. This is not adding value for anyone except people whose function is to look busy, and people trying to avoid their busy work.

Yes, I don't find AI generated documents are useful, they just add a ton of fluff. but it's removable fluff at least was my point.

Whenever I see AI-generated content put forward for my attention, I extract myself from the situation with the minimum possible time expenditure from my side. It's some sort of a leverage: "I spend 5 minutes prompting, so that you could spend 30 minutes reviewing". Not gonna happen LLM buddies.

If you were too lazy to write it, I'm too lazy to read it.

It's like an amplification attack.

>>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

> I agree with everything you've said, but don't you think quite a lot of things have also been like this before, just to a lesser degree? That’s exactly the reason LLMs and friends are so dangerous to companies, and it’s so hard for them to resist using them in useless/counter-productive ways. They’re excellent at faking signs of effort and work that companies can hardly help but reward, absent any actual way to measure manager effectiveness (and approximately nobody knows how to measure that, in the wild). This takes the form of gilding and padding on a lot of communication, none of which adds actual value but it does cost money directly and indirectly (time wasted sorting out which parts of a document are intentional and meaningful, and which are plausible but irrelevant LLM inventions, for instance)

I often think that executive level work is about changing the executive team and writing memos about changing the executive team. Then there’s a different team with different members and they begin the cycle again. Repeat over and over again. The number of times I’ve seen a HTML memo sent from the assistant of the executive that says “from the desk of…” with babble about new leadership.

I saw something really similar happen at my last few jobs. 2 jobs ago vibe coding wasn't even viable but some of the people went so hard on making everything so much more bloated with LLMs it was so hard to get yes or no answers for anything. 1 line slack, 20second question would get a response that was 2 pages of wishy washy blog posts with no answer. Follow ups generated more hours wasted. My last job we watched a PM slowly become a vibe manager of vibe coders. He started inserting himself into technical discussions and using ai to dictate our direction at every step. We would reply but it got so laborious fighting against a human translating ai about topics they didn't understand people left. We weren't allowed to push back anymore either or our jobs would get threatened due to AI. Then they started mandating everyone vibe coded and the amount of vibe coding as being monitored. The pm got so disorganized being a pm and an engineer and an architect(their choice no one wanted this)that they would make multiple tickets for the same task with wildly different requirements. One team member would then vibe code it one way and another would another way. It was so hard to watch a profitable team of 20 people bringing in almost 100million of profit a year go into nonutility and the most pointless work. I then left. I am trying my best to not be jaded by all of these changes to the software industry but it's a real struggle.

My line manager using a lazy single line description of a product is generating whole product listings and HTML for our web shop, never checking it. SEO is poor, views and conversion are collapsing. Upper management is responding to my serious issues with ChatGPT bullet point lists that don't address the problem. Video conferences I can see people typing into and reading back GPT instructions, suppliers are sending AI generated product images. 3rd party site devs are running buggy site deployments with Claude Code written as co author. I can't take it anymore, its an office of zombies.

Also customers have started sending 2 page long tickets copy pasted from GPT (keeping the text formatting, font etc) trying to worm their way around consumer law and using floral language that doesn't go anywhere. Responding in seconds after I respond to them with another 2 pages of fluff. Just a waste of my time.

> The cost of producing a document has fallen to nearly zero; the cost of reading one has not, and is in fact rising, because the reader must now sift the synthetic context for whatever the document was originally about. Each individual decision to elongate seems rational, and each is independently rewarded — readers are more confident in longer AI-generated explanations whether or not the explanations are correct [5]. The collective effect is that the signal in any given workplace is harder to find than it was before any of this began. The checkpoints have been hidden, drowned in their own paperwork, even when the people drowning them were genuinely trying to “be brief” I just finished working with a client that is producing documents as described in this quote. The first time I recognized it was when someone sent me a 13-page doc about a process and vendor when I needed a paragraph at most. In an instant, my trust in that person dropped to almost zero. It was hard to move past a blatant asymmetry in how we perceived each other’s time and desire to think and then write concise words.

Our team is assessing some new tools and one of our VPs produced a document just like this and none of us read it because it was obvious that it was generated slop and way too long. I don't get what value such tomes are actually providing when you're comparing three SaaS tools against each other.

Sometimes, yes. Other times, no. It depends who's leveraging the technology to write these things. Though even in the positive outcome cases, the volume alone is suffocating. My brain doesn't have time to commit all of it.

What I see in this article is a kind of structural isomorphism: it sincerely criticizes AI slop while reproducing the same failure mode it is criticizing. Intentional rhetorical repetition is not necessarily bad. I repeat myself too when I want to make a point stronger. The problem is the context. This is an article that sincerely criticizes the inflation of workplace artifacts. In that context, repetition and expansion become part of the issue. As far as I can tell, the article provides only one real data point: a colleague spent two months building a flawed data system, people objected as high as the V.P. level, and the project still continued. The author clearly experienced that incident strongly. But then almost every general claim in the article seems to radiate outward from that one event. The cited papers mostly work to convert that single workplace experience into a general thesis. If you remove the citations and reduce the article to its core, what remains is basically: “I observed one colleague I disliked producing bad AI-assisted work.” That may still be a valid experience. But inflating a thin signal with length and authority is close to the essence of the AI slop the author criticizes. The article’s own writing style participates in that pattern. Again, I do not think repetition itself is bad. Repetition can be useful when the context justifies it. But context has to stay beside the claim. Without enough context, repetition starts to look less like argument and more like volume. p.s I’m a little hesitant to use the word “structural” in English, since it has become one of those overused AIsounding words. But here, I think it actually fits.

I mean, not every communication can be a PhD dissertation that provides dozens of examples as evidence and cites 100 sources. Sometimes, it's enough to have a single good, representative example and build a narrative around that through rhetorical devices like repetition. We are not holding the author to the standard of proof that academic papers are held to. I agree, though, that repetition, if that's all the author is leaning on, can get annoying.

> The cost of producing a document has fallen to nearly zero; the cost of reading one has not, and is in fact rising, because the reader must now sift the synthetic context for whatever the document was originally about. This resonates. It's a spectacular full-reversal kind of tragedy because it used to be asymmetric the other way . Author puts in 10 effort points compiling valuable information and reader puts in 1 effort points to receive the transmission.

> because the reader must now sift the synthetic context for whatever the document was originally about > time wasted using AI on tasks that did not need it, on artifacts no one will read, on processes that exist only because the tool made it cheap to construct them. On decks that spell out things that previously didn’t even need to be said or were assumed. I work at MSFT and at-least in my org, this is happening at warp speed. Every document I read, my first thoughts are what is the kernel of the idea that the writer was trying to convey ? Because 95% of the content of the doc is just verbiage. You can always tell its verbiage, the em-dashes, the rhythmic text, the green check mark emoji etc. We are hoping that volume of output will make up for the quality or lack thereof. More markdown files, more AGENTS.md file but is that making us better developers ? It certainly is giving the illusion that we are faster but I don't know how management thinks this will lead to tangible impact on the top line or bottom line. In my experience, some of the best writing (in design docs and PM specs) at MSFT have been human written. You can see the clarity of purpose from the writer, ithere is no need to read it again, it is equivalent to having a 1-on-1 with the writer themselves. But AI written slop, the less said the better. This piece hits home, I wonder how the experience is at other Big Tech companies.

I think it’s worth recognizing that people’s issues with LLMs isn’t that they make mistakes. And I think hammering the argument that humans also make mistakes indicates a bit of a disconnect with the more common reasons there is frustration with LLM use. Ultimately I think people find it frustrating because many of us have spent years refining our communication so that it is deliberate and precise. LLMs essentially represent a layer of indirection to both of those goals. If I prepare some communication (email, code, a blog post, etc) and try to use an LLM more actively, I find at best I end up with something that more or less captures what I probably was going to communicate but doesn’t quite feel like an extension of my own thoughts as much as an slightly blurred approximation. I think this also explains to some degree why it seems folks who were never particularly critical of their own communication have a hard time comprehending why anyone could be upset about this. There is of course the flip side where now when receiving communication that I have to attempt to deduce if I’m reading a 5 paragraph, meticulously formatted email (or 200 line, meticulously tested function) because whoever sent it was too lazy to more concisely write 2-3 well thought out sentences (or make a 15-line diff to an existing function). And of course the answer here for the AI pragmatist is that I should consider having an AI summarize these extensive communications back down to an easily digestible 2-3 sentence summary (or employ an AI to do code review for me). For those that value precise communications, this experience is pretty exhausting.

Yeah, that caught me off guard as well. Is it supposed to be a plot twist revealing the article is written/elongated with AI assistance? Didn’t immediately feel that way upon first reading, but who knows anymore.

Here is a solution to this problem I think: make an LLM. Summarize everything. If there is fluff then it should get dropped? Basically we only care about the relevant information content, regardless of the number of characters used - so we need a compressed representation

Fuck, yes. This. I work in an "AI-first" startup. Being "The Expert", my work has become 90% reviewing the tons of crap that confident BD people now produce, pretending to understand stuff that has never been their domain, proudly showing off their 20-pages hallucinated docs in the general chat as the achievement of their life. "Heads up folks, I wrote this doc! @OP can you review for accuracy and tone pls?" And don't hit me with the smartass "just say no", it's not an option. I tried that initially. I have a pretty senior position in the org, I complained to the CTO which I report to, and with the BD managers as well, that I do not have bandwidth to review AI-produced crap. After a couple of weeks, CEO and leadership in an org call spelling out loud that "we should collaborate and embrace AI in all our workflows, or we will be left behind". They even issued requirements to write a weekly report about "how AI improved my productivity at work this week". Luckily I am senior enough to afford ignoring these asks, but I feel bad to all my younger colleagues, which are basically forced to train their replacements. I am not even sure at this point whether this is all part of the nefarious corporate MBA "we can get finally rid of employees" wet dream, whether it's just virtue-signalling to investors, or if CEO and friends genuinely believe their own words. I have the feeling leadership (not only in my org) has gone in AI-autopilot mode and just disappeared to the sunny tropical beaches they always wanted to belong to. I would happily find another workplace at this point, but you know how the market is right now, and anyway, I have the feeling that this shit is happening pretty much anywhere money is. Everyone feels smart now, and it's a curse. God, how I hate this. It's making my life miserable.

I think it's interesting that the data suggests that novices can increase productivity by a third and experts not at all. That sounds very similar to Dunning-Kruger- the novices literally don't know what productivity looks like. I'm finding it difficult to agree on document creation now being zero cost whereas consumption is high cost. I think you can actually spend time giving AI enough context to consume docs for you. I think the other thing worth pointing out with the article is understanding what your company will recognise. Yes, it's totally correct that your company won't thank you for poopoo-ing the idiot with AI. Yes, they'll run into a buzz saw when they hit a stakeholder who can choose to buy in. Don't burn your career protecting theirs. In fact it's not even certain that the idiot is damaging their career (for many reasons). This was a really interesting article.

> Requirements documents that were once a page are now twelve. Status updates that were once three sentences are now bulleted summaries of bulleted summaries. I've been on the receiving end of this and it sucks. It shows lack of care and true discernment. Then you push back and again, you're arguing with Claude, not the person. I don't know what the solution is here. :(

Increasingly, there is a disconnect between established operational/corporate systems and the new AI-enhanced powers of individual workers. The over-production of documents is just one symptom. It's clear that organizations are struggling to successfully evolve in the era of worker 'superpowers'. Probably because change is hard! Perhaps this is indicative of a failure of imagination as much as anything? The AI era is not living up to its potential if workers are given superpowers, but they are not empowered to use them effectively. Empowered teams and individuals have more accountability and ownership of business outcomes - this points to a need for flatter hierarchies and enlightened governance, supported by appropriate models of collaboration and reporting (AI helps here too!). In the OP article the writer IMHO reached the wrong conclusion about their colleague who built a system that didn't work - this sounds like the sort of initiative that should be encouraged, and perhaps the failure here points to a lack of technical support and oversight of the colleague's project. Now more than ever organizations need enlightened leadership who have flexible mindsets and who are capable to envisioning and executing radicle organizational strategies.