Everything is --verbose now

It’s 2026 and we can’t deny the fact that AI is everywhere, especially if you do some sort of knowledge work.

I’m no anti-AI and I use AI a lot. I use it to brainstorm, write code and multiple other things.

Using AI is the norm now, and I don’t see a way to turn things back. But the thing is, the world or atleast internet has become too verbose.

I’ve been working with a freelance client for some time. They handed me a project requirement/spec sheet for a small backend solution that involves some logic but nothing complex.

When I opened the document, I was shocked! Freaking 47 pages.

When I used to work as a product engineer in an organisation full time earlier (pre-AI era) I used to ensure that all requirements are scoped well. A backend spec like this would have been maybe 8 to 10 pages, nothing more.

But today with AI, when anyone can write a book with a few prompts, spec sheets and requirements(even readme files!) have become annoyingly, unnecessarily long!

So I replied to the client, “Ehm, this is a bit too long, I would like to review it in detail and get back to you, I would need a couple of days.” They were totally cool with this.

When you encounter a situation with too much information, the natural instinct these days is to feed it to AI, ask it to summarise, flag any issues and give you a handoff.

I also do that if I’m doing some stuff that’s boring, but with client work, I try to be careful because AI can overlook things and in the end it will say “Oh I’m sorry, I should have…” Can’t risk it for client work atleast!

So I started going through the doc, line by line, taking notes and flagging stuff alongside. Usually I feed this to AI to further brainstorm, then reach back to the client.

This was taking a bit longer but the next day the client reached out to me again and said, “Hey Rishi, I know that document is a bit long, I want you to review it fast so I made a new document.”

The file name was XYZ_DEVELOPER_HANDOFF.pdf

A freaking another document that’s not 47 but 19 pages! Huh.

I eventually got through both, flagged the gaps and got back to them. But the whole experience made me realise how much AI has inflated the volume of everything we write.

This is not a one-off incident.

If you look at Upwork job postings, pretty much most of them are so big that you become tired reading them. Some of them are so bad that people copy paste markdown and directly paste it, so you see a lot of text with asterisks everywhere.

Also if you work in corporate, you would have noticed that most emails these days are just way too long. Perfectly formatted with lots of punctuation and of course with em dashes!

I understand the reservations people have if their first language is not English. Using AI to help communicate better is totally okay. But you don’t need to type a freaking paragraph as a reply when someone applies for a sick leave!

The final nail on the coffin was when we met a couple during a party and when my wife texted her something on WhatsApp, all her replies were a bit robotic and weird.

Then we realised, the consistent use of em dashes and the sparkle emojis. It was AI!

We are not close friends with them, but imagine the effort to copy paste something or even draft a prompt to reply to someone. It’s called instant messaging for a reason.

I think writing clearly and writing concise stuff has always been a great skill. But it’s never been more important than now when most of the text written on the internet is made with AI.

So think clearly, write more, don’t worry about punctuation and make mistakes. Atleast that will make you writing look like it was written by a human!

And please write shorter emails. –verbose only if it’s absolutely necessarry!

(≖_≖ )

P.S: This blog post was –verbose intentionally.