Appearing productive in the workplace

Queue not que.

> The article almost reads like a practical manual for increasing perceived productivity inside a company.

I think the truth is that at many (most?) places, perceived productivity and convincing is all that matters. You don't actually have to be productive if you can convince the right people above you that you are productive. You don't have to have competence if you can convince them of your competence. You don't have to have a feasible proposal if you can convince them it is feasible. And you don't have to ship a successful product if you can convince them it is successful. It isn't specifically about AI or LLMs. AI makes the convincing easier, but before AI, the usual professional convincers were using other tools to do the convincing. We've all worked with a few of those guys whose primary skill was this kind of convincing, and they often rocket up high on the org chart before perception ever has a chance to be compared with reality.

Please explain what you would have preferred instead, I'm failing to understand your criticism here.

What I see in this article is a kind of structural isomorphism: it sincerely criticizes AI slop while reproducing the same failure mode it is criticizing.

Intentional rhetorical repetition is not necessarily bad. I repeat myself too when I want to make a point stronger. The problem is the context. This is an article that sincerely criticizes the inflation of workplace artifacts. In that context, repetition and expansion become part of the issue.

As far as I can tell, the article provides only one real data point: a colleague spent two months building a flawed data system, people objected as high as the V.P. level, and the project still continued. The author clearly experienced that incident strongly. But then almost every general claim in the article seems to radiate outward from that one event. The cited papers mostly work to convert that single workplace experience into a general thesis.

If you remove the citations and reduce the article to its core, what remains is basically: “I observed one colleague I disliked producing bad AI-assisted work.”

That may still be a valid experience. But inflating a thin signal with length and authority is close to the essence of the AI slop the author criticizes. The article’s own writing style participates in that pattern.

Again, I do not think repetition itself is bad. Repetition can be useful when the context justifies it. But context has to stay beside the claim. Without enough context, repetition starts to look less like argument and more like volume.

p.s I’m a little hesitant to use the word “structural” in English, since it has become one of those overused AIsounding words. But here, I think it actually fits.

It's also wrong advice. After an LLM produces code, asking it if it's correct (in a variety of other ways) can often find actual problems with it.