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.
Where I landed is that it's their work, full stop. 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
One thing I expected was that AI would save me review time. So far the opposite. 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. The weak spots read just as smoothly as the strong ones. So I've been reading things more carefully this year, not less, even though the drafts are genuinely better and come in faster.
I don't say that as a complaint. I'd rather review a good draft carefully than fix a rough one. The time just moved, and I didn't expect where it would move to.
The checking is 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 our time arguing about the thinking instead of the formatting.
Why I'm thinking about it now
These tools are spreading through the team on their own. Nobody needed my permission, and most of the adoption happened before I noticed it. The part I can actually influence is whether we build good checking habits while a missed error still just costs us a bad draft or a bug in review. I'd rather my team learn that reflex on small things now than on something expensive later.