Rafal Cymerys · 2026-08-21 · notable
Rafal Cymerys — AI-written docs now get skipped before they get read
Rafal Cymerys writes that he now skips work documents that look AI-written, the same way people ignore banner ads. He lists the tells: Claude-style phrasing, routine features sold as breakthroughs, and long text that says little.
Rafal Cymerys says constant exposure to AI-written text has trained him to stop reading it at all.
What is it?
'I'm becoming AI-blind' is an essay by Rafal Cymerys, CTO of the AI consultancy Upside, about a reflex he did not choose. Cymerys writes that his eyes now slide off any work document carrying the marks of AI generation, before he has decided whether it is worth reading. He treats this as pattern recognition rather than snobbery — people really can spot low-effort machine text.
How does it work?
The tells listed in the essay are specific. Cymerys names Claude-style phrasing such as 'This cuts just through it', verbose internal reasoning left sitting in the text, and routine work sold as a breakthrough — his example is a document that dramatizes 'the checkboxes in an RBAC configuration view'. A fourth tell is tonal mismatch: sensible strategy stitched to technical jargon that means nothing.
Why does it matter?
Banner blindness is the comparison Cymerys reaches for: heavy exposure trains the brain to filter out a whole format, and he argues the same thing has now happened to AI prose. The cost is that useful documents get thrown out with the noise — 'the same AI that was supposed to make me more productive, is what's now slowing me down.' The essay drew 424 points and 429 comments on Hacker News.
Who is it for?
anyone writing docs for a team