If You are Asking for Human Attention, Demonstrate Human Effort

An ever-increasing volume of debug investigations, document writing, and code is written by robots. This has created a new etiquette question when working with a team – when is it OK to forward the output of an AI to another human to read?

On one hand, an AI with robust integration to internal code bases and documentation often produces genuinely ^{useful output.}

On the other, as an increasing amount of a software engineer’s day is spent reading AI text, a fatigue sets in. If I can have a robot say something, so can you. It reads as inconsiderate to post un-digested AI output as though it’s your own writing.

I remember the first time I experienced this annoyance. I proposed a design, and a teammate prompted an AI to critique it. The teammate sent an AI document to me, with the disclaimer: “I didn’t read this, so it might not be entirely accurate”. My thought was, _if reading this wasn’t worth your time, why is it worth mine?”

Therefore, I’ve adopted this principle in my work:

If you are requesting human attention, demonstrate human effort.

If useful, I send AI generated content to teammates. But when doing so, I take care to clearly label what is AI generated, and I add my own commentary alongside it. For human code review requests, I always review my AI-generated code first.

Attention was already a scarce resource before AI, and it is even more so now. Keeping AI generated content clearly labeled and demonstrating human effort helps show consideration for teammates, and keeps a touch of humanity alive in our work.