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Comment by whatever1 | Hacker News Reader

To me it seems that LLMs are a tool that only increase productivity for given headcount in dimensions that were neglected in the past.

For example, everyone now writes emails with perfect grammar in a fraction of a time. So now the expectation for emails is that they will have perfect grammar.

Or one can build an interactive dashboard to visualize their spreadsheet and make it pleasing. Again the expectation just changed. The bar is higher.

So far I have not seen productivity increase in dimensions with direct sight to revenue. (Of course there is the niche of customer service, translation services etc that already were in the process of being automated)

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It's an interesting dilemma, since if I know that an email was written mostly with AI, it feels to me like the author didn't put effort in, and thus I won't put much effort into reading the email.

I had a conversation with my manager about the implications of everyone using AI to write/summarise everything. The end result will most likely be staff getting Copilot to generate a report, then their manager uses Copilot to summarise the report and generate a new report for their manager, ad inifinitum.

Eventually all context is lost, busywork is amplified, and nobody gains anything.

> Eventually all context is lost, busywork is amplified

why not fire everyone in between the top-most manager and the actual "worker" doing the work, as the report could be generated with the correct level of summary?

as google seems to do (seen that other HN post today)

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/08/27/google-executive-says-compan...

Mostly because there are different depths of reporting required depending who you’re creating said reports for. Often it’s unnecessary bureaucracy, but also often the ones doing the “actual work” don’t have a full understanding of how what they’re working on interacts with other parts of a system. (I mean this broadly, and not just related to software development)

Middle management can sometimes be good at this, because they may actually have the time to step back and take a holistic look at things. It’s not always easy to do that when you’re deep in the weeds with clients, managers, colleagues, or direct reports bugging you about misc things.

Overall I think (or hope) the more useless reporting will die a slow death, but I also think there’ll be a loooooong period of AI slop before we reach the point where everyone says “why are we actually doing this?”

My experience has been interesting. I have been sending super short, mostly dot point emails since before LLMS. Pre ChatGPT I used to cop a bit of shit about it. Now thought, people love it.

I'm sad to see this for several reasons because I do not expect or want everyone up use a LLM to converse with me via mail, the whole point is to exchange information, with everyone using a LLM as output and input, now the whole thing becomes a game of telephone.

You do not need to build a spreadsheet visualiser tool there are plenty of options that exist and are free and open source.

I'm not against advances, I'm just really failing to see what problem was in need of solving here.

The only use I can get behind is the translation, which admittedly works relatively well with LLMs in general due to the nature of the work.

I don't have time to read paragraphs of AI slop emails. Please keep them short and to the point. No need to send it through an LLM.

Corporations will require everything going through an LLM to meet company standards.

> For example, everyone now writes emails with perfect grammar in a fraction of a time.

And absolutely bloody _hideous_ style, if they are using our friends the magic robots to do this.

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