AI;DR or Don't be a meat proxy

Rick Manelius’ AI;DR (AI; Didn’t Read) post showed up in my feed yesterday and really resonated with me:

Look, I get it. It’s Q3 2026, and we should expect that everyone is utilizing AI at SOME point in their process (sourcing ideas, creating outlines, refining prose, etc.). However, I have a new policy. If you’re not bothered enough to review and edit it… …then I’m not going to bother reading it.

Look, I work as an AI Product Manager so I’m clearly biased toward AI, but it’s become one of my biggest pet peeves to get Slack messages or entire PowerPoint presentations generated by an LLM with zero human review. It drives me nuts. It wastes my time because it’s is either over-engineered, full of mistakes and irrelevant filler, or just straight-up hallucinations.

Or as Niklas Gruhn puts it in Don’t be a meat proxy:

Reading AI output is extra effort. It’s verbose, frequently contains all too plausible nonsense, and is increasingly jargon dense. (…) don’t just relay the output. Read it, understand it, validate it, and then write a response in your own words (a decent certificate that you’ve done the prior steps). Making that effort is value you can add.

If you want to avoid brain rot, don’t hand off your thinking to AI. Do the job you’re actually paid for. Stop wasting energy, water, and people’s time :)