Ex-Amazon Engineer: AI Has Killed Bezos's Six-Page Memo Culture
bibryam · x · 2026-10-16
- Steve Huynh, who spent nearly 20 years at Amazon, argues AI has turned the company's writing culture from a superpower into a liability.
- Trigger: at a recent review, an L7 principal PM was visibly reading his own six-page document for the first time — and nobody spoke up because he was the most senior person in the room.
- Bezos banned PowerPoint around 2004 because a six-page narrative memo guaranteed the author had done the necessary thinking. That guarantee is now trivially bypassed by AI.
- The writing process used to ensure an author thought before demanding an hour of everyone's time; with that mechanism gone, Amazon's secret sauce is dying.
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