Your Slop, My Sludge

You’re not outsourcing work to AI. You’re creating organizational sludge slowing down your experts. I have over 20 years of experience in running infrastructure. I’m what many people would call an “expert” in my field. I’m spending most of my time reviewing other people’s low effort output. I’m not saying LLM output can’t be useful. Use the word prediction machine to help you predict better words. Don’t foist the words on other people without critically thinking about what you created. You are still responsible for the quality of your output. There used to be a cultural standard: if I created crap, my work was crap. This was eventually enforced by leadership through employee reviews and project assignments. Now the culture has shifted to only reward output velocity and the experts are demoted to expertise spell checkers. The value I’m allowed to bring is a red squiggly line. This is primarily driven by leadership who are the most prolific slingers of slop. Your experts are drowning.…