No context

Over the last few weeks I have received an increasing amount of Teams messages and PR comments with little more than copied output from an AI. This doesn’t bother me, I’ve been using AI tools in one shape or another for much of my career (before they were called AI when ML and Big Data were en vogue) so I’m used to the shape of the information. The pattern that I have seen emerge though is I’m often lacking context for why that AI generated information is useful or worth wading through.

Just like a commit message that reads like a bill of materials, AI output gets so focused on “what” that “why” is rarely captured in the output. So if you’re going to share your AIs output with somebody else make sure they have the context for why that information is worth consuming, otherwise you’re dropping them into the middle of a conversation with no context, and they might walk away.