Generating text with AI is free, but human attention is expensive. If you want someone's time, show some real human effort first.
Want me to spend 15 minutes of my finite human life reading your pitch or reviewing your pull request? You better show some actual blood, sweat, and tears instead of throwing lazy AI-generated garbage at my face.
We live in a bizarre time. People are too lazy to write a simple, decent email, yet they expect the recipient to spend their precious time and cognitive energy to read and reply with absolute sincerity. On his blog, Tom Bedor published a short, punchy piece that serves as a reality check for our increasingly automated, low-effort communication culture.
Back in the day, writing a cold email, a bug report, or a feature request took time. You had to sit down, think, and type. That friction was a natural filter—it kept the absolute nonsense at bay.
Today? With the explosion of various ai tools, generating thousands of words of polished, corporate-sounding text takes exactly two seconds and a single click. The cost of creating information has effectively dropped to zero.
But there is one cost that will never go down: human attention.
The author points out a frustrating paradox: Many folks want to deploy a complex architecture on a cloud vps or pitch a startup idea. Instead of writing a concise, punchy summary, they prompt ChatGPT to vomit a massive wall of text. They then hit send, expecting a living, breathing, busy human to parse through that mountain of fluff to find the core point.
Let’s be honest: You are using a tool that took 0 seconds of your time to demand 10 minutes of someone else’s. That’s not productivity; it’s pure laziness.
The post rapidly climbed the ranks on Hacker News, securing nearly 1500 points. Devs and maintainers worldwide jumped into the comments to vent about their daily battle against automated noise:
At the end of the day, Tom Bedor's golden rule is simple but essential for survival in the modern tech landscape:
"If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort."
If you want to survive and thrive as a dev, keep these pragmatic rules in mind:
Write clean code, write short emails, and stay human in a world full of bots!
Source: Tom Bedor's Blog
