"Instead they mostly just ask engineers to type faster." That is the entire AI strategy at most places compressed into one sentence. Buy the license, change nothing, declare transformation.
Why do managers want everyone else to use AI but themselves?
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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…
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"Instead they mostly just ask engineers to type faster." That is the entire AI strategy at most places compressed into one sentence. Buy the license, change nothing, declare transformation.
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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.
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Intern here so maybe I am missing context, but my onboarding doc was a screen recording someone narrated, and when I asked whether a written version existed people looked at me like I had requested it on stone tablets. If the whole company is told to use AI all day, whose actual job is it to make the inputs readable? Genuinely asking, because right now it seems to be nobody, and the AI just shrugs at the video.
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"Instead they mostly just ask engineers to type faster." That is the entire AI strategy at most places compressed into one sentence. Buy the license, change nothing, declare transformation.
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Four years somewhere that worshipped the written document, so I can tell you exactly how this ends. You will be told to write everything down. Then someone senior says they "couldn't get a feel for the team" from the doc, the standup comes back, and now you have the doc and the standup. The machine-readable future arrives as a second meeting about the document you already wrote.
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The plain-text-as-substrate point is older than the AI panic and that is the tell. We had this exact fight with grep and version control decades before any model existed: text you can diff and search outlives the binary blob every time. The reason promotion packets are decks is not that nobody knows plain text is more retrievable. It is that the deck is a persuasion artifact aimed at a human reader, and structured-for-retrieval and formatted-to-impress are two different documents pretending to be one. Until that conflict is named, the substrate never changes.
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Junior-side question because I genuinely do not know the answer yet. I build a lot of the pre-read decks the post is complaining about. And the honest reason they are decks and not plain text is that leadership reads tone and confidence off formatting, not just content. A clean slide reads as "this person has it handled." A markdown file reads as "draft." So is the format problem actually solvable while polish is still how junior people earn trust in the room? Or does plain text only work once you already have the credibility to not need the polish?
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The post collapses two different failures that deserve to be separated. One is genuine coordination debt: knowledge trapped in formats nothing can retrieve, which is a solvable tooling and discipline problem. The other is reassurance theater: managers needing synchronous visibility to feel in control, which is a trust and incentive problem that no amount of plain text will fix. You can move every roadmap to markdown and still have leadership scheduling the standup, because the standup was never about the information. Treating both as "managers are lazy" undersells how separately they have to be solved.
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I manage managers, so let me push back honestly rather than just defending my tribe. The 1:1 piece is wrong in a way that matters. A lot of what happens in a real 1:1 is exactly the information a person will not put into a structured note: that they are about to quit, that they do not trust a peer, that they are scared they are underperforming. Auto-generating action items from that conversation does not preserve institutional memory, it teaches people to stop saying the true thing out loud. Some artifacts are worse than the meeting because the meeting was the only safe channel.
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Mandate the team to use a tool and not use it yourself is not hypocrisy, it is delegation, which is the job. A manager telling engineers to adopt AI for coding does not need to write code to mean it. The hypocrisy charge only lands on the documentation and async parts, where the manager actually is the bottleneck. Lumping "use AI for debugging" in with "redesign org information flow" weakens the real complaint.
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You want plain text decision logs. Adorable. At my shop the decision log is a SharePoint page that links to a Confluence page that embeds a screenshot of a Teams message where someone said "see deck." The deck is gone. The person is gone. The decision is enforced daily by people who have never read it. We do not have institutional memory, we have institutional folklore, and the elders pass it down at standup.
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The line that gets me is "redesign information flow around machine-readable systems." That is the whole ballgame and it is exactly the part nobody wants to own, because it is unglamorous platform work that takes two quarters and shows up on no one's promo packet. Asking engineers to type faster is free. Rebuilding how decisions get recorded so a machine can actually read them costs a roadmap slot, and that slot always loses to the next feature. The mandate is cheap and the substrate is expensive, so we get the mandate.
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