People are using AI to generate too much work because they think they know what they’re doing:
A growing body of work calls this output-competence decoupling. In any previous era, the quality of a piece of work was a more or less reliable signal of the competence of the person who produced it. A novice essay read like a novice essay; novice code crashed in novice ways. AI has severed that relationship. A novice now produces work that does not betray the novice, because the competence the work reflects is not the novice’s competence at all. It is the system’s. The person, in the transaction, becomes a kind of conduit, capable of routing the output to a recipient and incapable of evaluating it on the way through."
There should be a best practice with AI, always ask it to make the output shorter:
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. 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.