The thing that’s starting to irritate me is not the AI push itself. Some of the tools are genuinely useful. I use them every day now. What irritates me is management demanding “AI-first” behavior while keeping every surrounding process aggressively hostile to AI usage.
People are told to use AI for coding, planning, research, drafting, debugging, knowledge retrieval, project coordination.. But then half the company’s operational knowledge still lives inside undocumented conversations and bloated meeting culture. If leadership actually wants to push AI and make it central to productivity, the first thing they would do is redesign information flow around machine-readable systems. Instead they mostly just ask engineers to type faster.
Take 1:1s.
If companies were serious about AI-assisted work, every 1:1 would generate structured notes automatically. Action items, blockers, staffing concerns, career goals, follow-ups. Not because surveillance is good, but because institutional memory in most companies is terrible. Half of management is rediscovering the same context every quarter because nothing survives the meeting itself.
Instead we still pretend the important part of management is the live conversation rather than the persistent artifact generated from it.
Or standups.
We still burn engineering hours gathering humans into recurring ceremonies where everybody performs progress in real time. Meanwhile AI is perfectly capable of parsing written updates, identifying blockers, clustering related issues, generating summaries, escalating risks, and tracking drift over time. But that would require managers to consume information asynchronously instead of relying on meetings as reassurance theater.
Then there’s documentation.
This one drives me insane. Companies say they want AI-enabled workflows while critical planning documents are trapped inside giant Word files, screenshots pasted into spreadsheets, roadmap updates embedded in slide decks, and promotion packets formatted for visual polish instead of structured retrieval. If you actually want AI leverage, plain text should become the default organizational substrate.
Roadmaps: plain text.
Planning docs: plain text.
Promotion evidence: plain text.
Decision logs: plain text.
Postmortems: plain text.
Not because markdown is superior. Because machines can actually work with it cleanly. You can have workspaces of administrative documents, just like you work with code, and rely on CLI agents to work with them! But no, you gotta put everything on word docs -_-
Right now most organizations are doing the equivalent of buying industrial machinery and then feeding it laminated paper through a slot.
The people pushing hardest for AI integration are often the same people stuck copying meeting notes out of Google Docs, manually rewriting Jira updates, converting screenshots back into text, and sitting through status meetings that exist mainly because nobody trusts asynchronous systems enough to rely on them.
What management seems to want is AI acceleration at the employee layer without accepting the organizational consequences of designing around machine-readable work. They want their teams to adopt AI, but not have to adapt themselves.