--- title: Rick Manelius's Newsletter | daily.dev description: A newsletter author shares a new personal policy of refusing to read unedited AI-generated content, coining or popularizing the acronym AI;DR (AI; Didn't Read)... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/rick-manelius-s-newsletter-rbgwgi5yg twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: Rick Manelius's Newsletter | daily.dev og:description: A newsletter author shares a new personal policy of refusing to read unedited AI-generated content, coining or popularizing the acronym AI;DR (AI; Didn't Read)... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/rick-manelius-s-newsletter-rbgwgi5yg og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/RBgwgI5Yg.png og:image:alt: Rick Manelius's Newsletter og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Rick Manelius's Newsletter **[Lobsters](https://daily.dev/sources/lobsters)** · 2 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary A newsletter author shares a new personal policy of refusing to read unedited AI-generated content, coining or popularizing the acronym AI;DR (AI; Didn't Read) as a counterpart to TL;DR. The piece argues that unfiltered AI output in newsletters, social posts, and Slack messages signals a lack of care, and calls on readers to prioritize human-edited communication, while acknowledging that fully AI-generated text is fine in contexts like customer support. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Community take How the wider developer community reacted, aggregated from 2 discussions and 1253 comments across lobsters, hackernews (as of 2026-08-18). **TL;DR:** The discussion barely engages with the newsletter's actual argument about AI-generated prose, instead veering into a long, heated thread about AI-generated code comments and documentation clogging pull requests, and the broader workplace politics of pushing back on AI mandates. **Sentiment:** 5% positive · 15% mixed · 80% skeptical **The case for** - A few developers say AI-generated comments and documentation can genuinely help the AI itself on subsequent passes or reviews. - Some found success curbing AI comment bloat with strict tooling like character-limit hooks, CLAUDE.md instructions, or automatic PR denial rules. **The pushback** - Many report AI tools flood pull requests with excessive, redundant, or outright wrong comments and documentation that nobody actually reads. - Commenters say it's nearly impossible to instruct LLMs to stop over-commenting even with explicit prohibitions. - Several argue that raising concerns about AI slop at work risks being labeled 'anti-AI' and can jeopardize careers or promotions. - Some feel human reviewers can't keep pace with the volume of AI-generated code and documentation, making thorough review impractical. - A few claim leadership and management incentives (velocity optics, investor narratives) actively encourage AI slop regardless of quality concerns. **By community** - lobsters (mixed): No comment content was provided, so no discernible take on the topic. - hackernews (heated): The thread largely abandoned the newsletter's actual topic to argue fiercely about AI-generated code comments, workplace power dynamics, and whether pushing back on AI usage is career-safe. **Hottest debate:** Whether it's worth pushing back against AI-generated slop at work, given fears that doing so marks you as 'anti-AI' and risks your job versus letting the flood go unchecked. **Open questions** - Is generating verbose comments actually useful for AI's own future passes, or does it introduce redundant/misleading noise? - How can teams enforce concise, human-quality output from AI without constant manual intervention? - Is pushing back against AI-driven quality erosion at work actually safe for one's career, or does it vary heavily by company culture? **Highlights** > My coworkers continue to dump hundreds of lines of AI documentation in every PR and every other line of code has between one and ten lines of AI generated comments, talking about the real unlock and how things are byte for byte identical on the load bearing path or how the acceptance ladder is misleading. Features are coming out and metrics are improving, but we’re basically in a post readability code base, with the occasional performative comment about a variable name. I don’t really know how to address this situation or if it needs addressed. I certainly don’t read the long-winded AI comments or the AI documentation, but perhaps it’s useful for the AI on its next pass. > — [LPisGood on hackernews · 36 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49337050) > You can't keep up with the slop. And before you finish a first pass read on the wall of diff, another AI sloperator on the team has hit approve and the PR is merged. > — [Gigachad on hackernews · 2 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49338702) > No, if he speaks against it he gets labeled "anti-AI" and laid off or not promoted. If he stays silent he retains his job. Corporate Capitalism's main innovation was virtualizing feudalism. Now anyone with a bit of cash flow can be a feudal lord with peasants to do his will. No need to maintain land or fight over it with other feudal lords. There's still fighting, naturally, but now the game isn't zero sum. The serfs don't get any real say in this model. At best you can bend the lord's ear if you're sufficiently trusted an advisor. But part of the reason you're trusted is to be trusted not to treat the lord like he's too much of an idiot. A huge problem is that capitalism rewards cash flows and accumulated capital so powerfully that lots of other things just don't matter, potentially for a very long time. Look at GitHub. This leads to immensely extended fuck around phases and "find out" looks like IBM (fossilization and bizarre holdings corporation / dead company parking lot) just as often as it looks like Enron. > — [atomicnumber3 on hackernews · 3 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49341521) > I'm... Actually fine with that. In one direction. I use AI to fill in forma and usually it has really good pointers. I do not trust it to do it itself, but it does simplify things quite a bit. > — [RealityVoid on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49340994) > Just hit "deny." I've been training my co-workers that the AI-isms their "AI Assisted coding" do that some shit just isn't acceptable. I leave a comment and hit deny. It also helps that I control the policies on the repo and they can't merge in with a denial from anyone. So it's either a fix it, or explain why your work isn't getting done. My manager is also 100% with this. I've denied for poor branch names and commits from AI. I've denied for too verbose of comments from AI. I've denied for parts of the code base being touched that are not relevant to the case they are working on (login isn't broken, your case is to add a check box in the settings pane, remove the changes made to login). Pre-AI I wasn't fine with PRs with multiple features and touching irrelevant areas of the code base. Why would I be fine with it because my co-workers got new toys? You want AI to refactor a part of the codebase? Fine. Separate branch, new PR, and in the description, present an argument for it. Don't shoe horn it into something else. Also, I'm not obligated to hit approved on shit. I may also be a bit privileged because I can be a pain in the ass to whole team. I may be slower, but I've got the numbers, my code is creating way less bugs then my "fast more efficient" co-workers. > — [tcmart14 on hackernews · 2 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49341082) **Source threads** - [lobsters](https://lobste.rs/s/fx9pic/ai_dr_ai_didn_t_read) · 31 points · 10 comments - [hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49336573) · 969 points · 1243 comments ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [Don't paste the AI.](https://daily.dev/posts/don-t-paste-the-ai--8t87gqbj4) · Hacker News · 1 upvotes · 1 comments - [Now that your newsletter is AI-generated, I've Unsubscribed](https://daily.dev/posts/now-that-your-newsletter-is-ai-generated-i-ve-unsubscribed-xshwowprg) · Ibrahim Diallo · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [AI made you faster. It didn’t make you better.](https://daily.dev/posts/ai-made-you-faster-it-didn-t-make-you-better--5y1djgimq) · Atlassian · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [Write for people](https://daily.dev/posts/write-for-people-wfatmufup) · Lobsters · 1 upvotes · 0 comments --- Tags: [#llm](https://daily.dev/tags/llm) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/rick-manelius-s-newsletter-rbgwgi5yg) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"Rick Manelius's Newsletter","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/rick-manelius-s-newsletter-rbgwgi5yg","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/rick-manelius-s-newsletter-rbgwgi5yg"},"datePublished":"2026-08-18T12:13:35.855Z","dateModified":"2026-08-18T22:48:25.399Z","description":"A newsletter author shares a new personal policy of refusing to read unedited AI-generated content, coining or popularizing the acronym AI;DR (AI; Didn't Read)...","image":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/f_auto,q_auto/v1/posts/0fc00dac53c847942d137e0bc0035071?_a=AQAEuop","thumbnailUrl":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/f_auto,q_auto/v1/posts/0fc00dac53c847942d137e0bc0035071?_a=AQAEuop","isAccessibleForFree":true,"articleSection":"Lobsters","inLanguage":"en","publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180}},"author":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Lobsters","logo":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/s--tl8v_Fku--/f_auto,t_logo/v1698841318/logos/lobste.jpg","url":"https://daily.dev/sources/lobsters"},"commentCount":0,"discussionUrl":"https://daily.dev/posts/rick-manelius-s-newsletter-rbgwgi5yg","interactionStatistic":[{"@type":"InteractionCounter","interactionType":{"@type":"LikeAction"},"userInteractionCount":0},{"@type":"InteractionCounter","interactionType":{"@type":"CommentAction"},"userInteractionCount":0}],"keywords":"llm","timeRequired":"PT2M"} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https://daily.dev"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"Lobsters","item":"https://daily.dev/sources/lobsters"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"name":"Rick Manelius's Newsletter"}]} ```