'AI killed Amazon's six-page memo': colleagues now tag suspect docs 'AI;DR'
First seen on X 34 hours ago@TrungTPhan ♥ 1,7592 views
A post arguing that AI-written documents have gutted Amazon's famous six-page memo culture drew 1,700 likes on X.
Steve Huynh, who spent nearly 20 years at Amazon, wrote in his Oct 14 newsletter that because AI can produce six pages with no thinking required, a memo no longer guarantees its author did the thinking. He described an L7 product manager who was obviously reading his own document for the first time in a review.
Huynh says one senior engineer now tags such documents 'AI;DR' (AI, didn't read), reasoning that 'if a model wrote it, a model can summarize it.' Jeff Bezos banned PowerPoint from senior meetings in 2004 and opened them with 30 minutes of silent reading.
Under Trung Phan's post sharing the essay, a former Amazon L7 pushed back: 'a bad doc is a bad doc, doesn't matter who wrote it.'
“The usefulness of Amazon’s 6-page memo has been nuked by AI-generated text (employees sit in meetings suspecting text is AI and tune out).”
