Summarizer

> "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.

Taking a distance uni class now to maybe swap away from dev work and my submitted works that are to be reviewed and commented on by other students all come back with AI generated feedback and it's making me go insane. If I needed AI feedback I'd go ask an AI but for any communication now it's a cointoss if you're getting a human reply. /rant

I've seen some of this as well. It's OK to send me an agentic screed if it's just going to be consumed by my agent, but I want a nicely written summary up top that was made by you... I'm starting to value poor grammar, typos, and other signs of legitimacy

> 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.

It is worse because the signal is buried in the noise.

It was an annoying way of writing on places like LinkedIn and marketing copy for 3 or 4 years before LLMs appeared on the scene. I remember realising that I can't read them (my brain jumps between the words and the picture making it hard to focus on the content) before AI appeared.

God I hate the emoji and checkmark usage so much. It feels so try-hard cutesy. Just give me normal bulleted items, I can read.

I like them. It tells very clearly how much effort went into someone's work. I like them even more on code comments. It tells _precisely_ how much effort went into the pull request, so I don't spend time reviewing lazy work.

I wonder if we humans are already checking out from PR reviews from human effort that we've misjudged as AI. we are in so much trouble! lol

seriously! it feels so over the top.

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 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.

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 a lot and have on several occasions tried dictation as an initial draft authoring step. It was trash every time. Good for thinking through a concept but unsalvageable in the edit phase. Easier to throw away and rewrite now that you know what to say. Nowadays I like conversation as an ideating step. Talk to a bunch of people, try to explain yourself until they get it, see what questions they ask. Sometimes in HN threads like this :) Then write it down. You get super high signal writing where every sentence is load bearing. I’ve had people take my documents and share them around the company as “this is how it’s done” It can take weeks of work to produce a 500 word product vision document. And then several months to implement, even with AI.

Hmm... when I really care about the quality of something, I basically write what I think/speak, then try to edit it down by half. I don't find it unsalvageable, but the editing does require an order of magnitude more time than the initial draft of thoughts vomited into the keyboard.

> Don't you get dinged as a slow performer? No because the document is not the work. Management wants someone to figure out the solution to their problems. The document is just a step in solutioning. Without the doc, others would have to re-do all that work if you get hit by a bus. Or you’d be stuck in endless meetings conveying the vision instead of figuring out the next problem. Document length is inversely proportional to the quality of your thinking/insight. When you create fluff, everyone can see you didn’t do the work.

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.

> 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?

Another commenter above this proposed a pretty compelling theory for the source of this style: SEO-inflated prose online. If the models were trained on the internet, "higher quality" content needed to be indicated to them during RL somehow. Search engine ranking is an easy-to-obtain metric that's kind of like "quality" if you squint, turn around, and lobotomize yourself. So the AIs have a high likelihood of producing the kinds of content that is rewarded by Google SEO.

That's circular though. Why does that content get ranked highly? Because it gets a lot of backlinks, long clicks, etc. So people seem to like it.

> Why does that content get ranked highly? Search engines only show a snippet of the content and that always looks convincing. It's the whole content that is off and, unfortunately, a few seconds/minutes can pass before you realize it (If you ever do).

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".

Another hint is when the structure and formality of the response doesn’t match the medium. Like when someone sends you a whole article back in DMs along with headings for the sections. Even though real humans write like that when writing documents, they never did that in informal messaging.

Even that is pretty useless because we have no idea what context "your Claude instance" has. All you're doing is dressing up some bullshit to look authoritative. When I started my PhD I was already really good at typesetting with LaTeX. I started to bring in fully typeset works in progress for my supervisor to read through. These proofs often had fatal flaws. He asked me to stop typesetting until after the work had been verified because it looked too convincingly correct due to being typeset. That was about 15 years ago but I've never forgotten it. Drafts should look like drafts. Scrappy work and proofs of concept should look as such. Stop fucking with people by making your bullshit, scrappy ideas look legit. Progress is a cooperative effort. It's not about trying to make people say yes.

Can confirm. I saw some fresh out of college colleagues do this in text docs. Al nice markup, but the text content was very drafty. I always sent them back to keep the format concept-y if you are tuning the text first.

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.

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

The details might bury his point rather than illustrate it. The driving theme throughout seems to be that a tool tuned for correct syntax, with deep understanding of semantics will look like a Dunning-Kruger machine. The specific errors that the author's colleague was oblivious to don't add any weight to that general point, they only explain one specific instance. It's classic omega-consistency.

Speaking not as a professional mechanic, but as someone who maintains a car, two trucks, a tractor, a couple boats, and has googled quite a lot of torque specs in my time... If you're googling torque specs in 2026 you're gonna have a bad time. They're frequently just flat out wrong, especially the AI summaries ;). Use the authoritative source of truth--the shop manual published by the equipment manufacturer. Accept no substitutes.

Guys just go and ride it. It's their money. They decided to do this. They think you guys are stupid. Suck. Them. Dry. Or say goodbay, which is what I did on my previous role when the BS started to get obvious. Now I do LLM-assisted coding on my own terms. I decide what to do, review output and push back agains overengineered BS. But I'm a lucky one, as far as I can see. --- NO-ONE is going to be able to understand the the amount of slop created by unchecked LLMs. The path we're going forward is very clear, given how rapidly top-tier software has been degrading when they decided to pressure devs into this stupidity.

Yeah, the developers who will argue and teeth-gnash about using an ORM for weeks on the hope it will save a few hours perceived as boring or obvious are, simultaneously, annoyed and upset at being told to save time with super tools that save time and effort… Pay no attention to the software output or quality or competitive displacement of the people selling you tools. LLMs, like cheesy sales strategies, are something so lucrative the only thing you can really do is sell them first come first serve to other people. Makes so much sense. Why make infinite money when you can sell a course/tool to naive and less fortunate companies? So logical.

Same, I use Claude but cannot stand typing and being constantly flashed with suggestions that aren't right and have to keep hitting escape to cancel them. It's either manual or full AI for me. This happens in a lot if web tools that have been enhanced with AI, like a few databases with web UIs that allow querying. They are so bad. I really wish they would just dump the whole schema into the context before I begin because I don't need fancy autocomplete, I need schema, table, and column autocomplete wayyy more than I need it to scaffold out a SELECT for me.

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.

It's a small family run company that turns over multi million on bespoke stone pieces. AI is rotting away at the core of the business from leadership to customer service. I was passionate before the rot, but I've got a new job starting in 5 weeks and I can't wait. Perhaps you are self projecting a little, these people got employed on good wages and have the skills the just don't use them anymore. I hate the future.

> 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.

There was a hidden benefit in the old way: it avoided people making effort for things that weren't important. It took effort to make signal cut through noise. When it was low effort, it was obvious it was just noise and could easily be ignored. Now low effort noise can masquerade as high effort signal, drowning out the signal for things that actually matter. Direct relationships of trust matter more than ever now. You can't just trust that if something looks high effort that it actually is. You need to know the person producing it and know how they approach work and how they treat you personally. Do they cut corners all the time or only for reasons they clearly communicate? Do they value high quality work? Do they respect your time?

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.

It's just a classic noise problem. For better or worse people are flooding the internet with LLM output and the vast majority is not worth reading. People will focus on cheap "tells" to judge what's worth spending their time reading.

I brought this up during our AI workshops, but I called it the “confident idiot” Seeing the idea explored in such depth is great, I really am concerned about this.

So the opposite of quiet quitting is loud slopping?

totally agree. and hearing this one-sided diatribe spoken with so much conviction makes my eyes roll to the back of my head, he just "knew" everything was all ai generated.

Well this unlocked a new fear, I can imagine all the similar “nests” of AI generated content out there being created right now, I am likely to have to untangle one some day, or at least break it to someone that it’s garbage, almost as if the AI itself has built a nest and is hoarding artifacts but it’s actually the human deciding to bundle up the slop and put a bow on it.

Yes, one of those nests is AI-generated "books" on amazon which I just discovered a couple of days ago. For now it's really obvious but at some point it won't be.