Staying accountable for AI-assisted work
What I expect from my team, and from myself, now that a lot of our first drafts come from AI.
Everyone on my team has access to the same AI tools I use every day. I know from my own habits how fast ChatGPT can turn out a draft that looks finished, and as a manager I'm now on the receiving end of a lot of those drafts. That's been on my mind this spring, because I had to figure out what my standard should be for work that's partly AI-generated, and I didn't have anyone above me with a policy on it.
I landed on a simple rule: it's their work. They picked the tool, wrote the prompt, and decided the result was ready for me. If a section turns out to be wrong, pointing at ChatGPT doesn't get anyone off the hook. I apply the same rule to myself. ChatGPT helps me prepare most of my PRDs at this point, and when one of them has a hole in it, that's on me.
The review didn't get cheaper
I expected AI to save me review time, and it hasn't. Typos and half-finished sentences used to show me exactly where a document needed my attention, and an AI-assisted draft doesn't have those. An AI draft reads smoothly even where it's wrong. So I've been reading things more carefully this year, even though the drafts are genuinely better and come in faster.
I'd rather be reviewing good drafts than fixing rough ones, so this isn't a complaint. It just surprised me where the time went.
What I coach
The conversations I have with my team about this are mostly about verification. Where did this number come from? Did you confirm the doc describes how the workflow actually runs today, or how it's supposed to run? Could you defend this section in a meeting without the tool open in another tab?
If the answers are solid, I don't care how the draft got made. I'm glad when people use the tools well, since it means we spend the review time on the actual thinking.
Why I'm thinking about it now
Nobody rolled these tools out to my team. People just started using them, and by the time I noticed, most of the team already had habits built around them. What I can influence is the checking habits we build while a missed error still just costs us a bad draft or a bug in review. I'd rather the team build that reflex now, while the mistakes are small.