The effort signal

Fri, 12 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

When AI tools landed in most teams, so did a pattern nobody quite had words for: a colleague sends AI-generated output without reviewing it, expecting the group to do the evaluation they skipped. The frustration is real. But the usual framing, “show effort when asking for attention,” puts the weight on the wrong thing.

Tom Bedor articulated the rule he now follows after a colleague forwarded AI analysis they hadn’t read and asked him to evaluate it. The rule is sensible. But I think it misidentifies what’s actually broken.

When the AI Passes Every Test and Still Gets It Wrong

Thu, 11 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In early March 2026, Amazon’s retail site fell over repeatedly, and internal documents tied the outages to AI-assisted code changes. The worst, on March 5, took the site down for about six hours and dropped orders by roughly 99%, an estimated 6.3 million that never happened. A few days earlier, a separate AI-assisted change had quietly started showing customers the wrong delivery dates. That code compiled. It passed review. It shipped.

Productivity on Dr. Hitesh Sarda

The effort signal

When the AI Passes Every Test and Still Gets It Wrong