noslopgrenade.com is a website in the ilk of nohello.com, exhorting the reader not to just copy and paste giant walls of text into the chat. One line stood out as curious to me:
Nobody writes essays in Slack. It’s only possible because of AI copy-paste.
This has not really been my experience, but it depends on where you draw the line at “essays”. For me a 3-paragraph reply, of about 2-3 sentences apiece, is where I draw the line between “This can be a Slack message” and “This is better as an email”. But the examples given in No Slop Grenade suggest even that might be too much for the author’s liking.
I do this because I like a communication style where I lay out all the facts, and - crucially - give the other party time to get back to me. In fact when I make that transition from Slack message to email it usually comes with the proviso that I don’t actually expect to see a reply to the email unless I follow it up a few days later, with a shorter, punchier question. THis is all intentional and similar to Postel’s law but for human communication.
There is a better reason to adopt the laconic-by-default style of No Slop Grenade: Job security. A memo generally doesn’t just reveal the conclusions the author wrote, but the reasoning process by which they got there. If you assume that every email you ever send, every Slack message and Teams transcript, every Confluence page, etc. you send in a corporate environment are ultimately going to be surfaced, read, and reinterpreted many more times by LLMs in the future rather than flesh and blood human beings, then it’s easy to see how leaving a consistent, detailed track of your thinking makes it easier for your coworkers to ask e.g. “What would be Andrew Quinn’s modal take on X?”, without them needing you to give it in the first place. The more often you do this, the more often that answer will be in the ballpark of correct. If the AI can give you-like answers 90% of the time, and your job is 90% answers, you might well find yourself being cut down to ~20% time.
This may be at odds with your career goals. If you hide the
byproduct and only ever give short, oracular answers to what
you are being asked, you thin this pool out considerably. Nor
do you have to be a jerk about it - you can always draft your
own “thinking…” message, then just keep it somewhere else
until and unless someone else responds "Ok. Why". My hunch
is that, in most institutions, this question will rarely be
asked, and you will continue to extract a quite nice rent
on the ideas which seem to exist within only your head.
Modulo all this by the local conditions of your own employment, and by your own sense of ethics. If you are a heavily-paid consultant charging hundreds per hour, this might actually be a fantastic idea. If you work in a place without at-will employment laws, you might also find it worthwhile: It’s hard to argue that someone should be fired because Rovo agent can already answer all the questions they would be asked on the strength of their own stellar internal documentation. If you are a crypto-communist, it’s probably a very good idea to let the silicon beast convert your labor into capital even more than it already does, etc. etc.