AI-generated “workslop” is destroying productivity?

https://hbr.org/2025/09/ai-generated-workslop-is-destroying-productivity

by McScrooge • 10 months ago

245 164 10 months ago

mallowdram10• 10 months ago

"transfers the effort from creator to receiver."

AI is functionally equivalent to disinformation as it automates the dark matter of communication/language, transfers the status back to the recipient, it teaches receivers that units contents are no longer valid in general and demands a tapeworm format to replace what is being trained on.

backprop1989• 10 months ago

What’s a tapeworm format?

lazystar• 10 months ago

maybe chatgpt can help us understand it better

mallowdram10• 10 months ago

Whatever the training can't assimilate, yet can be transmitted by users as analytic statements.

httpsoverdns• 10 months ago

Are you able to read this article without paying, or do you only get this one paragraph summary?

c-linkage• 10 months ago

Check for no-script or ad-blockers. I could read in Chrome but not Firefox.

donatj• 10 months ago

My friends job of late has basically become reviewing AI-generated slop his non-technical boss is generating that mostly seems to work and proving why it's not production-ready.

Last week he was telling me about a PR he'd received. It should have been a simple additional CRUD endpoint, but instead it was a 2,000+ loc rats nest adding hooks that manually manipulated their cache system to make it appear to be working without actually working.

He spent most of his day explaining why this shouldn't be merged.

More and more I think Brandolini's law applies directly to AI-generated code

The amount of [mental] energy needed to refute ~bullshit~ [AI slop] is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.

jjgreen• 10 months ago

Ship it!

matheusmoreira• 10 months ago

He spent most of his day explaining why this shouldn't be merged.

"Explain to me in detail exactly how and why this works, or I'm not merging."

This should suffice as a response to any code the developer did not actively think about before submitting, AI generated or not.

mholm• 10 months ago

"You're absolutely right— This code works by [...]"

latexr2• 10 months ago

I think you might’ve missed this part from the post:

AI-generated slop his non-technical boss is generating

It’s his boss. The type of boss who happily generates AI slop is likely to be the type of person who wants things done their way. The employee doesn’t have the power to block the merge if the boss wants it, thus the conversation on why it shouldn’t be merged needs to be considerably longer (or they need to quit).

givemeethekeys2• 10 months ago

The nephew has no programming knowledge.

He wants to build a website that will turn him into a bazillionaire.

He asks AI how to solve problem X.

AI provides direction, but he doesn't quite know how to ask the right questions.

Still, the AI manages to give him a 70% solution.

He will go to his grave before he learns enough programming to do the remaining 30% himself, or, understand the first 70%.

Delegating to AI isn't the same as delegating to a human. If you mistrust the human, you can find another one. If you mistrust the AI, there aren't many others to turn to, and each comes with an uncomfortable learning curve.

zarmin2• 10 months ago

In the early aughts, I was so adept at navigating my town because I delivered pizza. I could draw a map from memory. My directional skills were A+.

Once GPS became ubiquitous, I started relying on it, and over about a decade, my navigational skills degraded to the point of embarrassment. I've lived in the same major city now for 5 years and I still need a GPS to go everywhere.

This is happening to many people now, where LLMs are replacing our thinking. My dad thinks he is writing his own memoirs. Yeah pop, weird how you and everyone else just started using the "X isn't Y, it's Z" trope liberally in your writing out of nowhere.

It's definitely scary. And it's definitely sinister. I maintain that this is intentional, and the system is working the way they want it to.

averageRoyalty• 10 months ago

Who is "the nephew"?

lazide2• 10 months ago

More precisely, each ‘AI’ is just a statistical grouping of a large subset of other (generally randomly) selected humans.

You don’t even get the same ‘human’ with the same AI, as you can see with various prompting.

It’s like doing a lossy compression of an image, and then wondering why the color of a specific pixel isn’t quite right!

doublerabbit• 10 months ago

Understand the first 70%.

With the 70% you then pitch "I have this" and some Corp/VC will buyout the remaining 30%.

They then in return hire engineers who are willing to lap the 70% slop, and fix the rest with more AI slop.

Your brother dies happily achieving their dream of being a bazillionaire doing nothing more than typing a few sentences in a search bar.

oblio2• 10 months ago

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/05/26/reading-code-is-li...

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-... (read the bold text in the middle of the article)

These articles are 25 years old.

fzeroracer• 10 months ago

Sadly, I've seen multiple well-known developers here on HN argue that reading code in fact isn't hard and that it's easy to review AI-generated code. I think fundamentally what AI-generated code is doing is exposing the cracks in many, many engineers across the board that either don't care about code quality or are completely unable to step back and evaluate their own process to see if what they're doing is good or not. If it works it works and there's no need to understand why or how.

RobinL• 10 months ago

I largely agree. As a counterpoint, today I delivered a significant PR that was accepted easily by the lead dev with the following approach:

1. Create a branch and vibe code a solution until it works (I'm using codex cli)

2. Open new PR and slowly write the real PR myself using the vibe code as a reference, but cross referencing against existing code.

This involved a fair few concepts that were new to me, but had precedent in the existing code. Overall I think my solution was delivered faster and of at least the same quality as if I'd written it all by hand.

I think its disrespectful to PR a solution you don't understand yourself. But this process feels similar to my previous non-AI assisted approach where I would often code spaghetti until the feature worked, and then start again and do it 'properly' once I knew the rough shape of the solution

cruffle_duffle• 10 months ago

The best way I’ve found to use LLM’s for writing anything that matters is, after feeding it the right context, take its output and then retype it in your own words. Then the LLM has helped capture your brain dump and organize it but by forcing yourself to write it rather than copy and paste… you get to make it your own. This technique has worked quite well with domains I’m not the best at yet like marketing copy. I want my shit to have my own voice but I’m not sure what to cover… so let the LLM help me with what to cover and then I can rewrite its work.

bwfan123• 10 months ago

The amount of [mental] energy needed to refute ~bullshit~ [AI slop] is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it

I see this in code-reviews where AI tools like code-rabbit and greptile are producing workslop in enormous quantities. It is sucking up enormous amount of human energy just reading the nicely formatted bs put out by these tools. All of that for finding an occasional nugget that turns out to be useful.

dsterry• 10 months ago

Implement a no workslop policy. Reputation will take care of the rest. Basically an educational task.

drivingmenuts2• 10 months ago

And just think of all the money spent on ChatGPT subscriptions. You’re not gonna see that back anytime soon.

theideaofcoffee• 10 months ago

The problem with most corporate work that these managerial idiots want replaced with AI is that is all so utterly useless. Reports written that no one will ever read, presentations made for the sake of the busy-ness of "making a deck", notes and minutes of meetings that should never have taken place in the first place. Summaries written by AI of longer-form work that are then shoved into AI to make sense of the AI-written summary.

I like the quote in the middle of the article: "creating a mentally lazy, slow-thinking society that will become wholly dependant [sic] upon outside forces". I believe that orgs that fall back on the AI lie, who insist on schlepping slop from one side to the other, will be devoured by orgs that see through the noise.

It's like code. The most bug-free code are those lines that are never written. The most productive workplace is the one that never bothers with that BS in the first place. But, promotions and titles and egos are on the line so...

AI in its current form, like the swirling vortex of corporate bilge that people are forced to swim through day after day after day to, can't die fast enough.

Terr_• 10 months ago

Summaries written by AI of longer-form work that are then shoved into AI to make sense of the AI-written summary.

Also the problem where someone has bullet-points, they fluff them up in an LLM, send the prose, and then the receiver tries to use an LLM to summarize it back down to bullet-points.

I may be over-optimistic in predicting that eventually everyone involved will rage-flip the metaphorical table, and start demanding/sending the short version all the time, since there's no longer anything to be gained by prettying it up.

mavamaarten• 10 months ago

So true. We used to appoint someone in the group to take notes. These notes were always correct, to the point, short and easy to read. Now our manager(s) are heavily experimenting with recording all meetings and desperately trying to produce useful reports using all sorts of AI tools. The output is always lengthy and makes the manager super happy. Look, amazing reports! But on closer inspection they're consistently incomplete one way or another, sometimes confidently incorrect and full of happy corpo mumbo jumbo. More slop to wade through, when looking for factual information later on.

Our manager is so happy to report that he's using AI for everything. Even in cases where I think completeness and correctness is important. I honestly think it's scary how quickly that desire for correctness is gone and replaced with "haha this is cool tech".

Us devs are much more reluctant. We don't want to fall behind, but in the end when it comes to correctness and accountability, we're the ones responsible. So I won't brainlessly dump my work into an LLM and take its word for granted.

ElevenLathe• 10 months ago

It's their company; we just work at it. If we want to exert more control in the workplace, we obviously need more power in the workplace. In the meantime, if they want the equivalent of their company's prefrontal cortex to be burned out with a soldering iron, that's their prerogative.

alexashka• 10 months ago

The problem with corporate work is that it exists - that corporations exist.

You do have the option to spend your time elsewhere - if you can handle every NPC friend and family member thinking you've lost your mind when you quit that cushy corporate gig and go work a low status, low pay job in peace and quiet - something like a night time security guard.

didibus2• 10 months ago

So many times you write a document for someone to review and question that it could be written better. Yet the reader will now just ask for bullet points from the AI. I was hoping people would go, right, let's just start writing bullet points from the get go and not bother with a full document.

Once you allow AI to replace the process, you kind of reveal that the process never mattered to you, if you want faster pace at the expense of other things, you don't need to pay for AI, just drop the unnecessary process.

I feel AI is now just a weird excuse, like you're pretending you have not lowered the quality and stopped writing proper documents, professional emails, full test suites, properly reviewed each other's code, no, you still do all this, just not you personally, it's "automated".

It's like cutting corners but being able to pretend like the corner isn't cut, because AI still fully takes the corner :p

AlexandrB• 10 months ago

It'll be very funny if any AI productivity gains are balanced by productivity loss due to slop - all the while using massive amounts of electricity to achieve nothing.

Bukhmanizer• 10 months ago

I don’t think AI slop is inherently mandatory, but I worry that the narrative around AI will devalue engineering work enough that it becomes impossible to avoid.

drivingmenuts2• 10 months ago

As someone who has spent the last 30 years honing my craft (programming), all I can say is this: ha ha!

BoorishBears• 10 months ago

I've spent 16 years and I won't exactly be cheering if we hit a wall with AI.

I love programming, but I also love building things. When I imagine what having an army of mid-level engineers that genuinely only need high level instruction to reliably complete tasks, and don't require raising hundreds of millions while become beholden to some 3rd party, would let me build... I get very excited.

pixl97• 10 months ago

Programming is almost never an objective in itself, it's a stepping stone to some other task. It's nice it pays a good living, but I have a feeling that's going away eventually.

kazinator• 10 months ago

That light bulb lying in a pool of epoxy resin is cool as hell though. A lot of poetic talent must have gone into the prompt.

Animats• 10 months ago

The article as I see it is just one paragraph that end "So much activity, so much enthusiasm, so little return. Why?" Is there more if you're a subscriber to Harvard Business Review?

keyshapegeo99• 10 months ago

I had to disable UBO and my VPN's ad blocker. Then the whole piece showed up

rickydroll• 10 months ago

Workslop production is how we determine who should get a ticket for Ark B.

varjag• 10 months ago

If you were around for the heyday of Markov chain email and Usenet spam this whole thing is familiar. Sure AI slop generation is not directly comparable to Markov process and generated texts are infinitely smoother yet it has similar mental signature. I believe this similarity puts me squarely in the offended 22%.

ryandrake2• 10 months ago

My management chain has recently mandated the use of AI during day-to-day work, but also went the extra step to mandate that it make us more productive, too. Come annual review time, we need to write down all the ways AI made our work better. That positive outcome is pre-supposed: there doesn't seem to be any affordance for the case where AI actually makes your work worse or slower. I guess we're supposed to ignore those cases and only mention the times it worked.

It's kind of a mirror image of the global AI marketing hype-factory: Always pump/promote the ways it works well, and ignore/downplay when it works poorly.

cjbgkagh2• 10 months ago

Just make shit up, or even better have the AI make shit up for you

Macha• 10 months ago

The problem is, the shit that's made up will be used to justify the decision as a success and ensure the methodology continues.

thatfrenchguy• 10 months ago

It’s kind of a good way to make your business collapse though, because figuring out the kinds of problems where LLMs are useful and where they’ll destroy your productivity is extremely important

noosphr• 10 months ago

Just ask an Ai to write how it made you more productive in daily work. It's really good at that. You can pad it out to 1m words by asking it to expand on each section of with subsections.

bdangubic• 10 months ago

if one works at a place like ryandrake for sure so much this :) also ask it to ultrathink and be super comprehensive, you’ll be promoted in no time

Gud• 10 months ago

Brilliant!

yifanl• 10 months ago

Ways AI have made me more productive: Spellcheck has reduced the number of typos I've made in slack threads between 4 and 10%.

Yoric• 10 months ago

« AI has made me productive by writing most of the answer to this question. You may ignore everything after this sentence, it is auto-generated purely from the question, without any intersection with reality. »

obezyian• 10 months ago

I went through this shit an year ago. The reports had to be weekly, though.

Everything sounded very mandatory, but a couple of months later nobody was asking about reports anymore.

belval• 10 months ago

I was in a lovely meeting where a senior "leader" was looking at effort estimates and said "Do these factor in AI-tools? Seems like it should be at least 30% lower if it did."

Like I use AI tools, I even like using them, but saying "this tool is so good it will cut our dev time by 30%" should be coming from the developers themselves or their direct manager. Otherwise they are just making figures up and forcing them onto their teams.

scrumper3• 10 months ago

I was that manager. I dunno about your senior leader but with me it was coming from a healthy place. After a few months of ra-ra from the C suite about how we were now an AI-first company (we're a tech consultancy building one-off stuff for customers) and should be using it in all our customer projects, I asked the question, quite reasonably I thought, "so am I going to offer lower prices to my clients, or am I going to see much higher achieved margins on projects I sell?"

And, crickets. In practice I haven't seen any efficiencies despite my teams using AI in their work. I am not seeing delivery coming in under estimates, work costs what it always cost, we're not doing more stuff or better stuff, and my margins are the same. The only difference I can see is that I've had to negotiate a crapton of contractual amendments to allow my teams to use AI in their work.

I still think it's only good for demos and getting a prototype up and running which is like 5% of any project. Most technical work in enterprise isn't going from zero to something, it's maintaining something, or extending a big, old thing. AI stinks at that (today). You startup people with clean slates may have a different perspective.

gdulli• 10 months ago

but also went the extra step to mandate that it make us more productive, too.

Before you make any decision, ask yourself: "Is this good for the company?"

pjc504• 10 months ago

It's amazing how US business culture has reinvented Soviet Stakhanovism.

cowpig• 10 months ago

What do you mean by this? My understanding is that Stakhanovism is kind of the opposite of US work culture in that it lionizes the worker and social contributions

Mistletoe• 10 months ago

The President is a Soviet planted saboteur, it's not that surprising, it's coming from the top down. I assume this is the US manufacturing revolution he has in mind.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stakhanovite_movement

In 1988, the Soviet newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda stated that the widely propagandized personal achievements of Stakhanov actually were puffery. The paper insisted that Stakhanov had used a number of helpers on support work, while the output was tallied for him alone.

mallowdram10• 10 months ago

This is absolutely dead-on.

contingencies• 10 months ago

News just in, Nvidia dumped $100B in OpenAI to pump the failing bubble.

meindnoch2• 10 months ago

Just give them an AI generated response.

didibus2• 10 months ago

Does your company have a stake in AI?

I suspect a lot of companies that go that route are pushing a marketing effort since they themselves have a stake in AI.

But I'd love to hear from truly customer only businesses, where AI is pure cost, with no upside, unless it truly pays for itself in business impact, and if they too are stuck in some justifying of their added cost loop to make their decision seem a good one no matter what, or if they are being more careful?

everdrive2• 10 months ago

This must be how conspiracy theorists feel. How could a whole class of people (the professional managerial class) all decide at once that AI was a wonderful too we all must adopt now, and it's all going to make all of us more productive and we're 100% certain about it? It boggles the mind. I'm sure just it's just social contagion, hype, and profit motive, but it definitely feels like a conspiracy sometimes.

moomoo11• 10 months ago

There’s no conspiracy.

People making the decisions are 5%, they delegate to managers who delegate to their teams and all the way down.

Decision makers (not the guy who thinks corner radius should be 12 instead of 16, obviously) want higher ROI and they see AI working for them for high level stuff.

At low level things are never sane.

Before AI it was offshore. Now it’s offshore with AI.

Prepare for chaos, the machine priests have thrown open the warp gate. May the Emperor have mercy for us.

pjc504• 10 months ago

Spending billions of dollars on marketing works.

nicbou• 10 months ago

Collective hysteria does not need to be planned. Sometimes things just fall into place, just like the conditions for a hurricane.

It seems to me like too many yearly bonuses are tied to AI implementation, due to FOMO amongst C-levels. The hype trickles down to developers afraid that they won't get hired in the new AI economy.

I don't think there's a conspiracy, just a storm front of perverse incentives.

rsynnott2• 10 months ago

It's social contagion. "Management", as a class, is actually fairly vulnerable to this; this is only the latest of a long, long line of magical things which will make everything more productive. Remember Six Sigma (as a white-collar cult, rather than as a manufacturing methodology)?

pkaye• 10 months ago

Come annual review time, we need to write down all the ways AI made our work better.

That is where the AI come into full use.

nilkn5• 10 months ago

Look, for most corporate jobs, there's honestly no way that you truly cannot find any kind or level of usage of AI tools to make you at least a bit more productive -- even if it's as simple as helping draft emails, cleaning up a couple lines of code here and there, writing a SQL query faster because you're rusty with it, learning a new framework or library faster than you would have otherwise, learning a new concept to work with a cross-functional peer, etc. It does not pass the smell test that you could find absolutely nothing for most corporate jobs. I'd hazard a guess that this attitude, which borders on outright refusal to engage in a good-faith manner, is what they're trying to combat or make unacceptable.

dukeyukey• 10 months ago

It's not a good-faith question to say "here's a new technology, write about how it made you more productive" and expect the answer to have a relationship with the truth. You're pre-ordaining the answer!

Zagreus21423• 10 months ago

If the corporate directive was to share "if AI has helped and how" I would agree. But my company started that way and when I tested the new sql query analysis tool and reported (nicely and politely with positive feedback too) that it was making up whole tables to join to (assuming we had a simple "users" table with email/id columns which we did not have due to being a large company with purposefully segmented databases. The users data was only ever presented via api calls, never direct dB access).

My report was entirely unacknowledged along with other reports that had negative findings. The team in charge published a self-report about the success rate and claimed over 90% perfect results.

About a year later, upper management changed to this style of hard requiring LLM usage. To the point of associating LLM api calls from your intellij instance with the git branch you were on and requiring 50% llm usage on a per-pr basis otherwise you would be pip-ed.

This is abusive behavior aimed at generating a positive response the c suite can give to the board.

mattgreenrocks• 10 months ago

Fascinating example of corporate double-speak here!

My management chain has recently mandated the use of AI during day-to-day work, but also went the extra step to mandate that it make us more productive, too.

Now they're on record as pro-AI while the zeitgeist is all about it, but simultaneously also having plausible deniability if the whole AI thing crumbles to ashes: "we only said to use it if it helped productivity!"

Do you see? They cannot be wrong.

cyanydeez• 10 months ago

Soundslike a case of Republicanism.

rsynnott2• 10 months ago

My management chain has recently mandated the use of AI during day-to-day work, but also went the extra step to mandate that it make us more productive, too. Come annual review time, we need to write down all the ways AI made our work better.

Bloody hell. That feels like getting into borderline religious territory.

vrighter• 10 months ago

yep, they have to justify the spend. Where I work they've literally disabled our ability to disable it via group policy. Statistical manipulation

duxup2• 10 months ago

I wonder how much this has to do with the LinkedIn world where everyone is making "I made us 100% more efficient last week with AI!" type stuff.

I'm not normally on LinkedIn but recently was and with the AI stuff the "look at me" spam around AI seems like an order of magnitude more absurd than usual.

paultopia2• 10 months ago

Is it the “workslop” that is causing the problem, or the slop that companies demand and that passes for work in the first place? Really wanna summon the ghost of David Graeber (“Bullshit Jobs”) here: if you’re a manager who demands your employees to produce PowerPoints about the TPS reports, you probably shouldn’t be surprised when you get meaningless LLM argle-bargle in return.

joe_the_user• 10 months ago

Fair point,

The thing about companies asking for slop is that a middle manager maintaining usual stream of vacuous text is a proxy for that person paying attention to a given set of problems and alerting others. AI becomes a problem because someone can maintain a vacuous text stream without that attention.

So it's likely to become an arms-race.

shash2• 10 months ago

So it's likely to become an arms-race.

And this is my real fear with the current crop of AI. That rather than improving the system to require less junk, we just use AI to generate junk and AI to parse AI-generated junk that another AI summarises ad infinitum…

Like, instead of building a framework that reduces boilerplate code, we use an LLM to generate that boilerplate instead (in a more complex and confusing manner than using a traditional template would).

Or, when dealing with legal or quasi-legal matters (like certifications), 1. Generate AI slop to fill a template 2. Use AI to parse that template and say whether it’s done 3. Use another to write a response.

Lots of paperwork happening near instantly, mostly just burning energy and not adding to either the body of knowledge or getting to a solution.

romaniv• 10 months ago

We call these workers “pilots,” as opposed to “passengers.” Pilots use gen AI 75% more often at work than passengers, and 95% more often outside of work.

Identify a real issue with the technology, then shift the blame to a made-up group of people who (supposedly) aren't trying hard enough to embrace the technology.

Embody a pilot mindset, with high agency and optimism

Thanks for the career advice.

vkou• 10 months ago

A pilot has ultimate authority of how a plane is flown, because it's their ass in the fire if the plane can't land.

If you're a low-level office drone, you are not a pilot.

jennyholzer• 10 months ago

Embody a slave mindset

lkey• 10 months ago

Ridiculous, I have it on good authority that embracing the 'hacker ethos' by becoming a 'coding ninja' with a 'wizard' mindset will propel you to next-level synergisms within transformative paradigms like AI and blockchain.

karakot• 10 months ago

To leverage that hacker ethos for maximum synergy, you'll need to empower a holistic and agile mindset. This allows you to pivot toward a disruptive paradigm and monetize your scalable core competencies across the entire ecosystem.

jjk1662• 10 months ago

Embody a pilot mindset, with high agency and optimism

Fly away from here at high speed

anal_reactor• 10 months ago

This isn't wrong though. There's obviously two types of people using AI: one is "explain to me how X works", and the other is "do X for me". Same pattern with every technology.

diegof792• 10 months ago

Yeah, the article was good until I reached that point. In which it became an ad for BetterUp consultancy to transform passengers into pilots.

nphardon2• 10 months ago

The ai use mandates are odd. My guess is that the c-level execs have very little practical technical skills at this point, probably haven't written a line of code in 20 years. And they believe ALL the ai hype. They think LLM's can do anything, so any employees not using them are clearly wasting time.

arwhatever• 10 months ago

The AI usage mandates are odd because why do the execs doubt that the workers try on their own to get the maximum utility out of the AI tools?

bluefirebrand• 10 months ago

Execs more or less always assume that workers are some combination of stupid and lazy

After all if they weren't stupid and lazy they would be important execs, not unimportant workers

nphardon2• 10 months ago

That adds to the dissonance for sure.

2THFairy• 10 months ago

AI criticism and pushback.

When you say "AI cannot do my job, [insert whatever reason you find compelling]" Execs only hear "I am trying to protect my job from automation".

The executives have convinced themselves that the AI productivity benefits are real, and generally refuse to listen to any argument to the contrary. Especially from their own employees.

This impedes their ability to evaluate productivity data; If a worker fails to show productivity, it can't be that AI is bad, because that'd mean the executives are wrong about something. It must be that the employee is sabotaging our AI efforts.

Galxeagle• 10 months ago

I've come to appreciate that using AI tools are a skill on it's own. Anything beyond auto code completion takes quite a bit of conscious effort to experiment with and then learn how to delegate to in a workflow. They often end up being valuable, but it did take some work to get out of my productivity 'local maximum' that maybe not everyone would naturally take on.

tbrownaw• 10 months ago

Well AI advocates keep insisting that the only reason for someone to not benefit is if they're resistant to change and too lazy to learn.

foolserrandboy• 10 months ago

I think if LLMs improved or our usages of them improved to the point we became design/code reviewers full time many of us would leave to do something less boring and so in some ways there is a negative incentive to investigate different AI driven workflows.

nilkn5• 10 months ago

Front-line workers have a conflict of interest (AI making their jobs easier may lead to layoffs); they're incentivized to be productive, but not so productive that they or a peer they like ends up without a job. That conflict of interest becomes extremely strong when most companies around them are already conducting layoffs, they already know people personally who've been laid off, and hiring remains at a low level compared to the 2010s and early 2020s.

Executives don't care about any of that and just want to make the organization more efficient. They don't care at all if the net effect is reducing headcount. In fact, they want that -- smaller teams are easier to manage and cheaper to operate in nearly every way. From an executive's standpoint, they have nothing to lose: the absolute worst-case scenario is it ends up over-hyped and in the process of rolling it out they learned who's willing to attempt change and who's not. They'll then get rid of the latter people, as they won't want them on the team because of that personality trait, and if AI tooling is broadly useful they won't even bother backfilling.

gosub100• 10 months ago

Not odd under the theory that they are being done to buy wiggle room to reduce the force later on. They announce the firing and layoff of those who haven't made their forecasted numbers.

ramoz• 10 months ago

My CEO sent an ai generated blog today. I've never felt more frustrated reading something in my life. "x happened, here's what it means", "groundbreaking", "game-changer", "significant", "forefront of a technological shift"

meindnoch2• 10 months ago

Why are you reading your CEO's blog?

This question applies whether it's written by an AI or not.

baobabKoodaa• 10 months ago

You misread. It's not the CEO's blog.

everdrive2• 10 months ago

I hope you learned an important lesson about reading the next email from the CEO.

duxup2• 10 months ago

At one company I worked at the executives sent out constant emails to everyone. It was part of the culture. After some layoffs HR leadership sent out a THREE PART email about how they were working on a very important project and how it took many many hours and meetings and so on.

The project was renaming the HR department ...

After that I sent all executive emails to a folder and did not read them, my mood improved drastically by not reading those emails.

ManlyBread• 10 months ago

I refuse to read anything that seems to be obviously AI generated. If they can't be bothered to write down what they think then I don't have any reason to bother with reading what they've posted either.

zmmmmm• 10 months ago

I've never yet accepted an AI written answer when responding to my emails all though I try it routinely. Mostly it just doesn't capture my style. But even when it does, there's some kind of essential spark missing.

I think a lot about the concept that the AI output is still 99% regression to a mean of some kind. In that sense, the part it can generate for you is all the boring stuff - what doesn't add value. And to be sure, if you're writing an email etc, a huge amount of that is boring filler, most of the time. But the part it specifically cannot do is the only part that matters - the original, creative part.

The filler was never important anyway. Physically typing text was never the barrier. It's finding time and space to have the creative thought necessary to put into the communication that is the challenge. And the AI really doesn't help at all with that.

tonymet3• 10 months ago

old flow : send RCA to customer in a timely manner

New flow: please run RCA through chatgpt and forward to your manager who will run it through chat GPT and send to the customer.

RCA is now 10x longer, only 10% accurate, and took 3x longer to get to the customer.

tonymet3• 10 months ago

The AI revolution 2022-2030 is a speed run of the IT revolution of 1970-2000. In other words, how to 1000x management overhead while reducing real productivity, meanwhile skyrocketing nominal productivity.

polloslocos• 10 months ago

The monetary analogy of nominal vs real productivity is so good — I’m stealing it for some undetermined use in the future.

tonymet3• 10 months ago

I appreciate that . I do spend a lot of time trying to be illustrative

diegof792• 10 months ago

Wow, this article resonates with me.

Today, I discussed with a product manager who insists on attaching AI generated prototypes to PRDs without any design sessions for exploration or refinement (I’m a UX designer). These prototypes contain many design issues that I must review and address each time.

Worse still, they look polished and creates the illusion that the work is nearly complete. So instead of moving faster, we end up with more back and forth about the AI miss interpretations.

mensetmanusman• 10 months ago

This is similar to how the internet destroys productivity with YouTube. Humans are masters of compensating productivity gains with time retrieval.

Now that ai makes my programming 10x more efficient, I will work 5x less destroying “half of my” productivity.

queenkjuul• 10 months ago

My manager has Claude leave a two-page worthless comment on every single PR we submit, uses copilot to write 20-line "summaries" of 5-line changesets, and once sent my coworker and I a Claude-generated document that was so unclear in its purpose that we both replied "what even is this" after which the manager just ghosted the slack thread and pretended it never even happened.

I'm looking for a new job.

suzzer99• 10 months ago

My manager is obsessed with AI agents. Thankfully he's leaving, so I don't have to look for a new job.

luPowB6aAcRZcFr• 10 months ago

I'm dealing with this now. It is the bane of my existence.

Paragraphs of content spread out over pages and pages of nothing. Laziness at enterprise scale.

Deep research reports are even worse. They will cite AI-generated content in their work, which makes verifying their sources an O(n^2) task since I, now, have to find the sources _those_ sources cited to find the truth.

This generation of AI is the worst thing to happen to humanity since social media.

hevangel• 10 months ago

I won't trust any AI productivity research if the test subjects do not have access to unlimited tokens/GPUs. I see how much productivity gain first hand when you can burn $20 of tokens to save you 30 minutes of human work or the miracle that will happen when you are burning several hundred dollars of tokens a day.

Even the OpenAI or Claude $200 plan doesn't give you enough tokens to make you truly productive. The true ROI measurement should be the token cost over your hourly wage times the time you had saved if you have to do it by hand

realitydrift• 10 months ago

The “workslop” idea captures something deeper than just bad AI output. It shows how the optimization trap rewards speed and polish even when substance is missing, which then widens the authenticity gap and erodes trust. It can be seen as a larger pattern called reality drift, alongside things like synthetic realness and filter fatigue. For anyone curious, there’s a working paper circulating that goes into this in more detail: https://figshare.com/articles/preprint/Workslop_and_the_Opti...

AI-generated “workslop” is destroying productivity?

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