I don’t want to read what you didn’t write
The post crystallized an increasingly common workplace frustration: if AI wrote your long message, why should another person spend time reading it?
The essay argues that generated prose can create an information asymmetry: the sender contributes a small amount of thought, an LLM expands it into a long document, and the recipient must spend human attention extracting what the sender actually meant.
Why HN cared
The discussion distinguished useful AI editing and fact-checking from delegating the actual thinking. Commenters repeatedly returned to the idea that writing is part of reasoning—and that artificially expanding a small amount of information creates work for everyone downstream.
HN snapshot: about 1.03k points and ~450 comments.
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Writes and Write-Nots
After exploring I don't want to read what you didn't write, you might want a related take on what's lost when writing is outsourced: Writes and Write-Nots.
A short essay arguing that writing is how people think, and predicting what happens when AI makes it optional.
Paul Graham · Wade · 5 min
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