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this post was submitted on 27 Oct 2026
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AI only feels like it boosts productivity because it kicks the can down the road and makes it somebody else's job to clean it up.
You saved time generating your work email? Now I spend time translating what it's actually supposed to say because half of it is irrelevant garbage.
You saved time generating your event poster? Now I spend time recreating it (because you've anchored on that version), or painstakingly editing out all the incorrect notation.
You saved time generating your logo? No there's no way to 'clean it up', the anatomy and structure makes no physical sense. So I have to recreate it from scratch anyway.
You saved time automating this spreadsheet? It's not arranged in an importable format and now i have to spend time breaking down all the arbitrarily merged cells so I can even use it. My computer freezes twice under the load of processing excess garbage data.
You only think AI saves time because it's wasting somebody else's.
It's a big multiplier on incompetence. It lets someone who's kind of bad at their job produce a lot more bad than they could before.
The spreadsheet one hurts. I'm currently going over a colleague's fancy spreadsheet and have decided that only an AI can edit it in the future, because the formulas are written in a way that need to be interacted with from a script or command-line tool and nobody's going to do that.
Office scripts are difficult yes
There are Python tools for interacting with xlsx which are pretty nice, but I'm not going to use that to edit a spreadsheet. Kind of defeats the purpose.
Well I can give an example of why a tool like that is useful.
Export data for a client form internal system but that export looks like shit.
I could spend an hour cleaning it up (multiplied by the number of other workers needing to do similar things) or I could write an office script and create essentially an import template that formats it nicely.
I'm choosing the latter every time.
Sounds pretty reasonable actually. We could probably use something like that for some of the reports we make. I'll look in to it.