I have told several people now that I will stop reading anything they send me until they stop externalizing the cost of their AI use to me. When something arrives with “just skim it” or “check before using,” that is where I stop, because it signals handing off work that I did not agree to.

AI makes it easy to generate code, explanations, answers to review questions, and entire docs without the author understanding any of it. Everything can look finished. Actually, more often than not, it can even be correct (!) without the author having checked it.

And that is the part that I’ve been struggling with recently, and what most of this post is about… I used to start reviewing work with the assumption that the other person did their homework. Now that may or may not be true, so instead of starting the review with a “is this a good change?” Now I often start with, “does the author understand what they’re sending me?”

Many people found it hard to believe that AI researchers think this way. Some explained it as a PR campaign to promote AI regulation, or as self-promotion, or as a way to boost AI company stock prices. Others felt it had to be impossible, because if you really believed this you’d be bombing datacenters instead of posting on Twitter.

In fact, not only do many AI researchers1 seriously believe this, they’ve been thinking and writing about it since the mid-2000s. Eliezer Yudkowsky — the ur-figure for most modern AI safety culture — has been publishing papers since at least 2008 saying that superintelligent AI could destroy all human life. It’s been such a common idea that the AI research community has abbreviated “how likely you think AI is to kill everyone” to “p(doom)” (i.e. the probability2 of doomsday) since around 2010.

Agentic development has brought new capabilities and unprecedented speed. But this speed has all but disintegrated our ability to collaborate. We pretend it’s fine, but look around. We toss 50-100 PRs per day at each other and call this teamwork? Part of what broke is that, because two very different kinds of work produce results in the same form, code, we keep mistaking one for the other. If you’re starting to feel lonely amid a swarm of agreeable robots, this conversation is for you.