Robot Girl Gang

Category: Shouting

  • Amazon’s Writing Culture Is Eating Itself

    Faster document production is putting us into a decision quality doom spiral. Let’s talk about how two trends are killing us cognitively and what to do about it.

    The outside world often makes much of Amazon’s writing culture. You can find plenty of writing on it from others, but the basics are: all proposals, reports, and reviews are presented in the form of a written narrative document, no longer than six pages (though you may add as many appendices as you like). We read the document in person for the first portion of a meeting, then discuss afterwards.

    While we gain the advantages of building a collective, durable memory and the ability to share ideas outside of an ephemeral meeting, most importantly this approach promotes critical thinking on both the input and output sides of a proposition.

    On the input side, the author cannot “baffle them with bullshit” in a rapid-fire slide presentation. They must think through the problem, consider the options, and then construct the story in a concise and coherent manner that stands up to scrutiny outside of fast talk and shiny slide transitions. Paper writing helps authors find the holes and inconsistencies in their own concepts, making for more thoughtful and thorough products.

    On the output side, the readers have time to digest the “why’s” and “what’s” of an argument. They can go back and forth between sections and see the connections, gaining the nuance provided by the richer context. This not only allows the readers to form better critical questions, it engages their minds fully in the story and situation to allow them to make better decisions.

    But there are two trends I’ve seen appear in the past few years that subvert the intent of the document-based culture and, I suspect, are contributing to worse outcomes: AI-assisted writing and Page Zero metrics.

    How AI-assisted writing in its most extreme form subverts the critical thinking of the author should be obvious. Feeding some bullet point thoughts into an LLM and instructing it to turn it into a white paper just takes a slide deck and makes it worse. You’re meeting the form and losing the function.

    Generally speaking, when I suspect that a white paper has been primarily authored by an LLM[1], my brain turns off. If the white paper presenter doesn’t respect me enough to spend the time thinking through their argument, I’m not going to respect the slop they’ve put in front of me. It’s the only time I’ll use an LLM to summarize a white paper for me.

    Now, LLMs can still be useful in drafting white papers. I’ve found them to be effective in “linting” a white paper for readability and voice. They’re most useful when used as a mirror, to reflect on your arguments and whether they’re coming across properly. But that’s after the primary writing is complete.

    The other trend, which is likely more Amazon-specific but far more dangerous, is Page Zero metrics. They’re just what they sound like: a “cover sheet” of a big pile of numbers before you get to any of the narrative behind them. An ocean of green up arrows and red down arrows short circuits any nuance and obviates the value of the following narrative.

    Leaders like Page Zero metrics because they’re easy to digest. If you see a red arrow, you can nitpick it and feel productive. Just make all the red arrows green and you’ve done your job, right?

    I recently spent 21 minutes of a 60 minute meeting listening to leaders bicker about whether the source of a certain metric was sufficiently accurate, when the metric is actually a proxy for whether the customer could achieve their goal. These leaders completely missed the real conversation they should have been having that actually was covered later in the narrative, but they hyper focused up front on that little red arrow and that was that. The much more nuanced and scarier conversation about end of life components that the team really needed executive decisions on was completely lost.

    Page Zero metrics have an easy solution: go back to basics. Quantitative measurements do still matter, and they need to make an appearance. But Page Zero metrics aren’t a problem of data, they’re purely a problem of information design and crafting the conversation you need to have.

    So put them in an appendix and drive the conversation as going section-by-section from front to back. Feature the conversations you want to have at the front of the document. If your leaders have too much fatigue from switching from meeting to meeting all day and can’t focus, go the psychological route and find the ways to make the document easier to digest through structural, grammatical, or even scheduling approaches.

    If you can, kill some trees and have your readers review an actual physical white paper in person, using a pen to make notes in the margins. The physical interaction further reinforces engagement with the document, focuses people away from “multi-tasking”, and breaks your readers out of screen hypnosis.

    Using written documents to interact with ideas provides the framework for the critical thought that LLMs can’t reproduce. We can use tools and mechanisms to improve the quality of our outcomes, or we can cut corners and turn into a cargo culture that preserves the ritual of the white paper while losing the thinking it was intended to produce. Don’t shortchange your readers, and don’t shortchange yourself.

    [1] – To be clear, certain markers on their own don’t indicate LLM authorship to me per se. For example, African writers tend to get falsely called out by American readers for phrases such as “delve into”, which is really just an artifact of the British English they learned in school. And I love my em-dashes. You’ll never take my grammar fascism from me.

  • We need to talk about humanoid robots.

    Humanoid robot shipments are up in 2026, there’s a multiplicity of vendors out there, and high production demo videos abound. Yet, no one’s asking the most important question: “So like, what does it actually do?”


    They definitely look cool, and I’m enjoying watching the capabilities develop and some of the technology trajectories that they subsidize. But while some companies may be claiming early commercial deployments, so did Juicero. It’s going to take thinking through two dimensions for them to be able to go pro.

    Ex-Kivans will know these dimensions by heart. The first is, of course, Mick Mountz’s axiom that “it’s not about the robot.” The second is Pete Wurman’s exhortation to “do one thing, and do it very very well.”

    
As human beings ourselves, we’re naturally in love with the human form. It’s a major factor in why humanoid robotics is literally all about the robot. Look at them walk, run, dance, make faces! See how closely our manipulator mimics a human hand! Great technology demonstrations, all of them, and on individual metrics they out-perform human beings.

    But those individual, isolated metrics don’t tell us anything about how a robot works as part of its larger environment. The value of automation, be it a dishwasher or a humanoid robot, lies in whether it has been correctly matched to its task and integrated well into the megasystem embedding it. It’s not about the robot, it’s about using whatever correct tools are available to best solve a problem repeatably, reliably, and at scale.

    But like Pete said, it’s to best solve a problem, not solve all the problems. Human beings are generalists, which means we’re kind of okay at all sorts of different things. To be viable enough to be worthy of sacrificing human creativity and intuition in a process, a robot (like an insect) is a specialist. When you ask a human being to do a robot’s job, our brains go to mulch and our bodies get slowly ground away. When you ask a robot to do a human being’s job, you’ll have an endless supply of unsolved or mis-solved edge cases to clean up.

    The human form of humanoid robots lets us mislead ourselves that they can replace the holistic human being in a system without thinking more deeply about whether the process itself should be redesigned.

    “But the world is built for humans!” And yet time after time, when we find automation that’s sufficiently useful we gladly modify our environments to incorporate it until the modification itself becomes so familiar as to be invisible. Elevators, railroads, and automobiles required far more drastic changes to how we design our worlds. If you’re afraid that your robot isn’t worth modifying its operating environment for, you’re probably not looking at the problem or your assumptions correctly and are trying to shove a robot into someplace it shouldn’t be.

    So… are humanoid robots going to be the next smartphone or the next 3D TV? One found its killer use case and became infrastructure; the other solved a problem no one had and died a historical footnote. If you’re working in this area, your Prime Directive must be forgetting about the cool factor and finding the one place that humanoid robots can do a thing— regardless of how unsexy it is— better and more reliably than anybody else.