Proof of Effort: Combating AI-Generated Noise
The only way to get a human to actually listen to you now is to prove you spent time on the request. We're drowning in AI-generated noise. When a teammate sends over a block of code or a debug summary, the first thing most of us do is scan for the tells of a LLM. If it looks like a raw prompt output, we subconsciously value it less. It's a weird new etiquette problem. On one hand, an AI that has deep access to our internal codebase and docs can produce something genuinely useful in seconds. It's efficient. But forwarding that raw output to a colleague feels like a shortcut that signals a lack of effort. We've reached a point where the quality of the answer matters less than the perceived work that went into it. So, where do we draw the line between being productive and being lazy? The Signal-to-Noise Crisis LLMs have made the cost of generating "perfect" communication zero. When everyone can produce a polished, professional email in two seconds, th...