A teammate sent AI feedback he hadn't read. So why should anyone read it?

The rule, and the moment that produced it

The post makes a narrow, sturdy argument: as AI output floods every channel, sending un-digested AI content to a colleague is inconsiderate, because "if I can have a robot say something, so can you." The catalyst was a teammate sending an AI critique of the author's design proposal, with the disclaimer that they hadn't read it. The author's standard in response: label AI content clearly, add personal commentary, and always review AI-generated code before asking anyone else to.

The thread had seen this person

What made the post land was recognition. A reader describing a specific coworker supplied the case study:

"A very prolific coworker who fully embraced claude has inflicted the team with a flood of AI-generated PRs. About six months later, it is his frequent bemoaning at the standup that their PR don't get reviewed."

Nobody avoids them on purpose — the reviews just take real time, and the author isn't spending any. Another reader had the same colleague in a different building, whose "every single code review, answer to any question… even their personal opinions during a design meeting, are all direct AI output with no massaging."

The reframe: attention isn't the real ask

The sharpest correction said the post aimed slightly off. A commenter relocated the principle:

"This isn't sufficient, it needs to be 'if you are asking for assumption of accountability, demonstrate human effort.' … people who make requests like this don't care about your attention, they only care about getting you on the hook for something."

The asymmetry scales past the office. A reader invoking the obligatory *Silicon Valley* reference noted AI makes interactions "too cheap for the party that already has disproportionate power" — the customer-service maze, the hiring ATS, each new hurdle now free to add.

The counterpoint, via Pascal

Not everyone bought the effort framing. A commenter reaching for Pascal argued respect is measured by outcome, not labor:

"Respect for the recipient is measured by whether the message serves the recipient's needs, not how it is produced. Similarly, any errors are the sender's responsibility, and not the fault of the tools they used."

There's a version of that which is true: a concise, correct, AI-assisted note can respect your time more than a rambling hand-written one. An engineer drowning in AI text daily said exactly that — he doesn't care if a message is AI-made "as long as they're short."

Where it nets out

The rule survives the objections because it's really about ownership, not provenance. The problem was never that a robot wrote the words. It's that the sender offloaded the thinking and the accountability along with the typing — and is now asking a human to supply both for free. One reader caught the absurd endgame: to prove a human was involved, "now you have to add typos and not use… emdashes and 'it's not X, it's Y'." The fix isn't typos. It's reading your own message before you send it.