“I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time.” — Blaise Pascal

Because of AI, everyone on your team is more productive than they were a year ago, just ask them. So why isn’t the company itself faster?

I think I know why.

Let’s say an engineer needs to write a tech brief for a database migration. Two years ago, this would’ve cost him an entire afternoon: reading the code and some articles online, weighing the options, writing, deleting, rewriting. The result was short, and every word of it had survived contact with his brain.

Fast forward to today, and he pastes the context into a model and hits send. A few minutes later, the agent hands back a plan several times longer than anything he would’ve written by hand.

Well, he’s more productive now, right? A fraction of the time, many times the output. But what about everyone else? A handful of reviewers open a document several times longer than it needs to be, with that unmistakable AI smell on it.

And the length is not the biggest concern! Given that the doc was clearly AI-generated, every reviewer is now also fact-checking the thing. The brief says the current job processes events sequentially. Does it, though? It says the migration touches nine tables. Is it nine? When a colleague writes a sentence like that by hand, you trust it, because someone counted and put their name on the count. When a model writes it, and the author didn’t check, the sentence looks exactly the same. You can’t tell which claims he stands behind and which ones the model dreamed up, so you have to treat every single line as unverified. The reviewers end up doing the thinking the author skipped (except this time it arrives nicely formatted, and with confidence 🥲).

So every one of those reviews now takes longer than it used to. He saved himself the afternoon and quietly spent everyone else’s. The time was just transferred, and because a document has one writer and many readers, one person’s shortcut becomes everyone else’s problem.

You see, a document is supposed to be a service. The (implicit) deal is that the writer spends their time so the readers don’t have to. It’s why Pascal, in that quote at the top, was apologizing: the long letter is cheap for me and expensive for you, the short letter is expensive for me and cheap for you. At the workplace, I usually owe you the short one because there’s one of me and many of you. Compression, editing, and fact-checking are the work.

By the way, it’s not just documents… I’m also seeing the same pattern in pull requests, automated tests, and even decisions. We’re going faster by passing the slow part (the reading, the actual understanding) to whoever comes next. A Ponzi scheme?

Don’t get me wrong: by all means, do use AI. I do too, and I’m (probably) not going back. The thing is: the model is giving you many hours back, so please spend a bit of them editing!

I already have a rule for AI-written code: if I can’t explain the change, I can’t ship it. The same rule applies here: if you can’t defend a sentence with the document done, it’s not really done, is it?

And if you’re on the receiving end of these, you’re allowed to push back and say: “This reads like an unedited draft. Can you cut it down to the decision, the tradeoffs, and what you need from me? Happy to review it then.”

So that’s why the company never speeds up, even when everyone in it does. The time that the engineer saved didn’t go anywhere good: it landed on everyone who had to read his document.

And again, he’s not lying when he says he’s faster. He is. So am I, most days. The speed is very much real for each of us individually. It’s just that when you add it up across the team, it points the wrong way; everybody’s faster, and the whole thing somehow moves slower.

Which makes me think we owe the people reading us a bit more than we’ve been giving them lately.