Colin Breck: I don't want to read what you didn't write — AI-generated docs are unreadable
vykthur · x · 2026-09-21
Systems engineer Colin Breck published an essay arguing that AI-generated writing has become punishing to read.
- People who rarely wrote now mass-produce AI-generated design docs, PR summaries, tickets and meeting recaps — detailed but context-free, written by machines for machines, answering none of the real questions (why, how risky, where's my input needed).
- The anti-pattern: build something with AI, then have AI retroactively summarize it into a design doc. Docs should build consensus through slow, deliberate thinking — instead they become unreadable, inhumane summaries.
- Even personal messages on sensitive topics are being AI-workshopped into impersonal prose.
Breck still uses AI to write better and faster, but reflects on how to use it without losing human judgment and perspective.
More from AGI Musings
- François Fleuret's alien joke: after 3.8B years, carbon-based design is about to switch — francoisfleuret · 2026-09-21
- Cheap human-level intelligence could build a Dyson sphere in a decade — EigenGender · 2026-09-21
- "Let em rip": X users debate how far current models are from real danger — tszzl · 2026-09-21
- Frontier open-source models have been out for ages and nothing happened, doomers told — tszzl · 2026-09-21
- Debate: regimes don't need x-risk-level AI to harm their residents — amplifiedamp · 2026-09-21
- Economist's "messy jobs" theory: two traits that protect work from AI displacement — ksprdk · 2026-09-21