Today in 30 seconds
AI can write a polished six-page memo in minutes. What it can't do is prove that the author thought it through. Steve Huynh spent almost twenty years in Amazon's writing culture, and he argues that AI has quietly emptied it out. The fix isn't banning AI. It's choosing which documents still need a human mind behind every sentence.
The problem
Amazon's six-pager worked because writing full sentences forced clear thinking before anyone asked for an hour of a team's time. Huynh shares a story from his community. A senior product manager opened a review on a six-pager, and two minutes in it was obvious he was reading it for the first time. Nobody in the room spoke up. Engineers now tag documents like that "AI;DR", short for "AI; didn't read". Their logic is simple: if a model wrote it, a model can summarize it. He hears that peer feedback in performance reviews goes the same way, written by AI and rolled up by AI.
The cost isn't the memo. One of two things happens next. Either a room of senior people loses an hour reworking a plan nobody thought through, or the team executes it anyway.
One-way doors and two-way doors
Huynh borrows Bezos's framing:
Two-way doors are reversible work, such as drafts, brainstorming, editing, status notes and boilerplate. Let AI help freely.
One-way doors are decisions that are hard to undo, such as annual plans, major re-architectures, PR-FAQs, performance reviews and promotion documents. A human writes them, and a human reads them.
He adds a few rules from an engineering policy at Clay. Own every word you send, whoever drafted it. Label generated text you quote. Spend more time writing than you expect readers to spend reading.
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My take
As a leader, a document is a promise that I did the thinking so my team doesn't have to redo it. When I review a design doc or a plan now, I ask the author to walk me through the trade-offs without the page in front of them. If they can, the doc did its job, however it was drafted. If they can't, the meeting isn't ready. Performance reviews are the line I won't cross. If my feedback on someone is generated, I've told them they weren't worth my attention.
Try this week
List your team's recurring documents and mark each one as a one-way or two-way door.
For one-way-door docs, add a single line at the top: "Author has reviewed and stands behind every sentence."
In your next review, open with two minutes of the author explaining the decision before anyone reads.
Source: Steve Huynh, "On the Death of Amazon's Writing Culture", A Life Engineered, Oct 14, 2026. Summarized with commentary. Read the full piece at the link above.
Keep going, one small spark at a time.
Erwin
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