Hey!

Welcome back to another week of musings.

I spent all weekend inside. I felt too tired to do anything at all. Hope you had a more entertaining and restorative weekend!

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Things I enjoyed in the past week

• Frameworks are dying, harnesses are winning A good explanation post about Harness engineering by Laurie Voss.
• Father of the iPod and iPhone on building taste, judgment, and creativity in the AI era | Tony Fadell Another podcast episode around taste. Why is Silicon Valley obsessed with it?

If you're ever in a large corporation, there are multiple teams that create documents like policies, business recovery documentation, high-level designs, architecture documents, decision records, etc. And lately, I've been bombarded at work with requests to review documentation.

These teams are increasingly using AI to compile sources and generate documentation.

I've been asking around, and most people are also overwhelmed by the amount of documentation being produced. But I think we're either burned out or so cynical about them that almost nobody pushes back on these documents.

In other cases, people are using AI to summarize all these documents and produce a reply, or in other cases, when we're asked to produce a document, a lot of people are just producing these documents with AI. And the receiving team is again using AI to summarize the document or to determine whether it complies with the minimum requirements for approval.

What's the point of all these AI sending AI stuff, and using AI to either comply or reply back? Is nobody going to realize that we're just lying to ourselves?

Putting myself in other teams' shoes, we're all being asked to work more with AI, and also work on more and more projects with fewer people. So the feasible way to "comply" is to generate an avalanche of documents and shift responsibility to other teams to validate and approve them.

So, if you play the system and use AI to generate or approve the documentation you receive, it becomes a cycle of "you activated my trap card!" and we send either larger documents or so many documents that there's no time for a human to review them.

Is there a way out of this? I don't think there is too much leeway at the moment. If you try to review manually, you'll burn out quickly due to the large number of documents. If you push back, these teams might already be overwhelmed with more work, so at best, they'll ignore the feedback. At worst, they'll ask you to just comply with their request.

The alternative would be a top-down leadership change, and make more grounded work requests. But we're in a gold rush, AI is here to change everything! So I don't think this is changing in the short-term.

Your turn!

How are you dealing with documentation overload? Maybe it's not happening where you work? Let me know your thoughts by replying to this email!

Happy coding!