AI wrote the memo. AI read the memo. Then everyone had the meeting.

Amazon is famous for banning slide decks. For about twenty years, a big meeting there started with a six-page written memo and roughly thirty minutes of silent reading, the "study hall," before anyone spoke.

According to Steve Huynh, who writes that he spent almost twenty years inside that culture, AI has hollowed it out. In an essay published October 14, he says that once a model could produce something that passed for a human-written six-pager, people stopped writing them.

The details, as he tells them. Huynh's examples come from people in his community, not from Amazon itself:

• In a recent review meeting, a principal product manager began presenting a six-page document and, two minutes in, it was "blindingly obvious" he was reading it for the first time.
• A senior engineer told him he now tags such documents "AI;DR," short for "AI; didn't read." His reasoning: "If a model wrote it, a model can summarize it."
• Peer feedback in performance reviews, already cut to roughly two short paragraphs per person, is now, he hears, written with AI and rolled up by AI, with managers as what he calls "meat proxies for a conversation between two prompts."

The phrase AI;DR was already going around online before this essay. The essay is what pinned it to Amazon, and it is spreading on X today.

What he wants instead. Huynh isn't arguing for banning AI. He borrows Jeff Bezos's idea of one-way and two-way doors: let AI write freely where a mistake is easy to roll back, but keep a human writing and a human reading for decisions you can't easily undo. He also points to a policy written at the startup Clay: stand behind every sentence, and if you generated a long document from a short prompt, share the prompt instead.

Our take

The joke writes itself, but the point is real. A document used to be proof that someone thought about the problem. If nobody wrote it and nobody read it, the meeting is the only part left, and that was never the useful part.

Our rule for our own writing: use the tools, then own every word.

What we did and didn't do: this is one person's account, based on what colleagues told him. We found no public response from Amazon, and MODEL hasn't independently confirmed the meetings he describes.

MODEL Editors