New workplace rule for the AI era: don't ask colleagues to read what you didn't

Software engineer Tom Bedor proposes an etiquette principle for teams drowning in machine-generated text: anyone requesting a colleague’s attention should demonstrate their own effort first. As AI tools take over more debugging, documentation, and code writing, he argues a quiet fatigue is setting in — engineers spend growing portions of their day reading robot output, and forwarding raw AI text as if it were your own thinking comes across as inconsiderate.

The essay’s catalyzing moment came when a teammate fed Bedor’s design proposal to an AI critic and forwarded the result with the caveat that he hadn’t read it himself. Bedor’s reaction — if it wasn’t worth the sender’s time to read, why is it worth the recipient’s? — crystallized the asymmetry at the heart of the problem: generating text is now nearly free, but reading it still costs human attention.

His proposed norms are modest and practical: clearly label AI-generated content, attach your own commentary when sharing it, and always review AI-written code yourself before asking a human to review it. The underlying point is economic — attention was scarce before AI and is scarcer now — and treating teammates’ attention as the expensive resource it is keeps collaboration functional as generation costs approach zero.