Signals of competence and diligence help build and reinforce trust.

Crafting a message for your known friend/ coworker almost always comes through in how it is written and structured, because it always weighs the arguments against the context of the business needs, communication norms, shared understanding of what's important, all implicit contacts about how we work together, the long term vision we shared over beers, the teams messages that the CEO sent three days ago, etc.

In a pure design doc - like a wiring diagram + 3 code snippets, this is a non-issue, so just ignore what I said (but consider it possibly).

In a doc for communication, especially of ideas, this is paramount.

The issue isn't using AI tools to write these "RFC" style docs. The issue is that in the very likely event that the output does not contain any of those very important bits (because how could it??), then we are in a situation where 1) this person I trust has lost some of that trust by not acknowledging any of the above or addressing it or structuring it in a useful way or 2) that person didn't try.

This is why communication is a valuable skill. It's always been implicit that effort slowly adds those and many more features of a good doc. Now it's explicitly not doing that, but still feigning effort with lots of formatting, etc. It moves the "add the important intangibles" from the writer to that reader, and like code review, that's laziness. We explicitly did not hire an AI, we explicitly hired a person, and that person should be filtering the world's noise through their valuable experience, and at least telling us that they did that. "I reviewed this and stand by it" is a very low bar to achieve, so I dont understand why there can be any pushback.

Is there a 3rd option here I'm missing?

EDIT: I can temper this a little bit. This is how I like to work. There might be a cadre of devs who are comfortable slinging 10 page unreviwed documents at each other. I'm fine with their existence I just think it's better to carefully review text from a close coworker because they deserve that time, and so I expect the writer would do at least one review themselves out of courtesy. I don't think any of this is arduous. If my boss told me to spend more time reviewing than the author was willing to spend writing, then I would either get comfortable with reduced dev output from this new DDOS, or find a new job.

EDIT2: Actually, it occured to me that everything I would say is well articulated here: https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/0576 which made the HN ruonds recently.