Some great bosses at early roles drummed into me to never use 3 pages when you could communicate 80% of the value in 3 paragraphs, or 3 bullets.
If I didn’t also get the essence into a single sentence and make the remainder optional reading, I’d get told in no uncertain terms that it wouldn’t be read unless I respected the time of the reader.
It’s easier than ever to be lazy, and easier than ever for your company to replace you with an agent if you’re not adding material value beyond what a frontier model spits out.
Still, I think this is a management/leadership problem with a solution that’s been in workplaces ever since I have: “You are responsible for your work product”.
Back in the olden days when “the internet” arrived on the scene, the basic standard expected of (and coached into) employees was that you continued to read, understand, and appropriately structure what you were producing for the audience and task (even though we were now capable of finding pages upon pages of loosely relevant content for the task at hand).
I don’t think this basic expectation needs to change in the era of AI, and I’m confident this behaviour can’t persist in an organisation where management sets meaningful expectations and provides material support, in service of making their teams communicate more effectively.
Also, I’m stealing the term “slop grenade”.