@aakashgupta: Too much of work has become processing others’ slop. That’s why Clay, the $7.1B sales AI company, just released an AI w…

x.com · 2026-09-30 · by Long Nguyen ·xcom

Too much of work has become processing others’ slop. That’s why Clay, the $7.1B sales AI company, just released an AI writing policy. I expect many companies to follow along. The policy arrives at several natural conclusions, that are not only true but more important than almost everyone realizes: 1. “Writing is a form of thinking” The old adage is obviously true. Once you outsource your writing to someone, or something, you outsource a good bit of your thinking. That’s why very few people have other people make slides for them. So why do they have AI? It’s a mistake. The reason PMs used to spend so much time on docs is they were the canvas for our thinking! We didn’t just write the PRD to tick off the work product. We did it to make sure we committed to a hypothesis in the spirit of the scientific method, and that we checked off all the edge cases for users. 2. Accountability is the job The reason we don’t hire AI agents to just do every job in a company is that we then still have to hold the accountability. The new reason to hire a human is less to do the work and more to hire the accountability. You hire that someone will be accountable for tasteful use of AI. Saying there’s a sentence in a long doc that’s to be ignored because it was written by AI is a form of disrespect of the time of the organization. One doc is often ready by many people, so it’s more worth one person’s time to edit a doc than many to read a slopsistic sentence. 3. There’s still an out There’s a clear way to use AI writing: labeling it. But the most annoying thing is when someone uses AI and then denies it. You get this hollow writing that Pangram clearly identifies as AI, and when you ask them questions about the work, reveals itself by their lack of understanding. The better thing to do is minimize it and put your level of effort upfront: “I used Claude for this. wdyt?” Is a much more coworker-friendly message than a disguised doc. Slop is most pernicious when it’s hidden. So how do you avoid it? • Prioritize collective over individual productivity • Model hard work out into docs from leadership • Create a policy like this that lays everything out clearly I heard these ideas most clearly articulated by my last two podcast guests, Charles Zedlewski, CPO at Together AI and Wade Foster, CEO at Zapier: - Charles: https://youtu.be/8TgxUPSuvNQ?is=m3h3RS-ttNvoKU_Z… - Wade: https://youtu.be/WbvJMnlB6wA?is=DVPmBA0p0CwJZflV… Have you instituted an AI writing policy? I’d love to hear other’s takes. They said AI killed the written word. Clay and I are saying: long live the written word!

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12:36 PM · Sep 30, 2026 · View on X

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