No One's Happy flags workplace AI theater

The sharpest point here is that AI doesn’t just automate work, it can also automate the appearance of work, which is a more corrosive failure mode.

• –The article’s core distinction is between producing plausible artifacts and actually understanding them
• –It frames “productivity” as a managerial illusion when teams reward dashboards, docs, and code volume over correctness
• –The examples land hardest in cross-domain work, where non-experts can now build convincing systems they cannot validate
• –The takeaway for teams is to constrain AI to tasks with fast feedback and human review, not open-ended credential-free work
• –It aligns with recent “workslop” research: the cost of bad AI output often lands on reviewers, maintainers, and downstream stakeholders