AI agents don’t just draft anymore; they run the entire workflow and hand you a finished product. The real question isn’t whether the output is good. It’s whether you ever actually argued with it before calling it done.
Merriam-Webster named “slop” the word of the year, and everyone assumed it meant the obviously bad stuff. The real risk is the AI-written content that reads just fine, sounds close enough to you, and slides through without anyone, including you, ever checking whether it was actually yours.
The tools got faster. The drafts sounded finished. But somewhere in the speed, I stopped listening for when a piece had actually landed, and started listening for when it worked. That shift was quiet. It cost more than I realized.