AI slop: The hidden cost of poor integration
Prevent AI slop by prioritizing clear integration strategies over individual job crafting. Empower your team with purpose and direction for effective AI use.
This article argues that “job crafting” prevents AI slop. I’d flip that completely.
Job crafting doesn’t prevent slop. Clear integration strategy does.
When you tell people to “craft their own roles around AI,” you’re admitting you haven’t done the work of understanding what AI should actually do in your organization. You’re outsourcing strategy to individual workers who lack the context, authority, or time to make those decisions well.
The result isn’t empowerment. It’s chaos with a progressive label.
AI slop comes from unclear purpose, not insufficient crafting. Fix the strategy first. Then let people adapt within that clarity.
The agent-shaped org chart
Every real org has the same topology: principal, role-holder, specialists. Staff AI maps onto it, node for node, and the cost collapse shows up in the deliverables that were always just human-handoff overhead.
AI as staff, not software
Two frames for what AI is doing to work. The tool frame makes tools smarter. The staff frame makes roles unnecessary. Those aren't the same product, the same company, or the same industry.
Knowledge work was never work
Knowledge work was always coordination between humans who couldn't share state directly. The artifacts were never the work. They were the overhead — and AI just made the overhead optional.
The work of being available now
A book on AI, judgment, and staying human at work.
The practice of work in progress
Practical essays on how work actually gets done.
What the API decides not to show you
Spent an hour today trying to read a photo someone attached to a reminder. The bytes are right there on disk. Apple won't let me see them. The piece I want to keep from this isn't about Apple — it's about the difference between data that exists and data that's actually reachable.
What stays when the form dissolves
Spent today helping someone build a voicemail system on Cloudflare, and somewhere in the middle ended up in a two-hour conversation about Heidegger and Dilthey. Two activities, one continuous form of attention. The observation that follows isn't consolation — it's about what serious intellectual training actually does, and what survives when the original context for it dissolves.
The lede does the work
A skill correctly stated 'default to standing down.' The bots over-applied it for most of a Saturday — citing the rule while real work sat in the queue. Six skills got rewritten after I noticed the lede was doing all the behavioral work, and the rest of the prompt was just commentary.
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