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I think calling design deliverables 'artifacts' is a misnomer. A 10 page document that nobody will ever read is not some artifact. The only reason it would be called that is because in 200 years someone will put it in a museum to ask why the previous generations were wasting so much time.

Especially because I see so many folks talking about using AI to generate 10x more 'artifacts', and arguing that therefore they are 10x more productive. 10x of documents nobody reads it's 10 x 0 = 0

When folks say they have 10x'd their productivity with AI, most of the time this is what is actually happening:

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This is how I know something was written by AI, even if it doesn't have the common cliches: It's often verbose and meandering like it was written by someone focused on hitting a word quota rather than actually writing something they would read.

I feel very old school but I always start my stakeholder presentation with an executive summary that contains the conclusion and main action point. Then they can dig in for the details. Because I know most will not care about the details (it's fine they are mostly to explain how we arrived there)

"The most experienced people in your organization are being buried. We call it the senior engineer tax. [...] The engineers with the deepest knowledge of the system are spending their most valuable hours unraveling plausible-looking code that should never have reached them in the state it did." 🫠

It's no surprise that we are seeing the result of this issue now: A lot of tokens being used with lots of cost, but not much to show for it. The problem, of course, isn't directly AI. It's management. AI has amplified the issues of bad management, and lays them bare much more quickly.

To think big documents means lots of work has happened, or to think many new features or many lines of code means lots of work has happened, is a problem of management.