Trung Phan shares a former Amazon engineer's essay saying AI generated six page memos are hollowing out Amazon's writing culture
The usefulness of Amazon’s 6-page memo has been nuked by AI-generated text (employees sit in meetings suspecting text is AI and tune out). Suspicious memos tagged as AI;DR (AI, didn’t read).
Context
Amazon's memo culture has been widely copied, so signs that AI written documents are eroding it point to a problem many companies may face.
This is secondhand: Phan is sharing screenshots from an October 14 Substack essay by Steve Huynh, who says he spent almost twenty years at Amazon and left in 2024. Huynh says his account comes from former colleagues and members of his community, so the anecdotes are unverified, and Amazon has not commented.
Deep dive
On October 18, Trung Phan posted that the usefulness of Amazon's six page memo has been nuked by AI generated text, with employees sitting in meetings suspecting text is AI and tuning out, and that suspicious memos get tagged AI;DR, for AI, didn't read.
His screenshots come from an essay Steve Huynh published on October 14. Huynh writes that in a recent Amazon review meeting, an L7 principal product manager presented a six page document, and that it was obvious he was reading it for the first time. He says he knows this because a member of his community was in the room.
Huynh describes Amazon's tradition of starting meetings with silent reading of a narrative memo, which Jeff Bezos argued forces clear thinking. He writes that the culture survived the pandemic but not AI, and that a senior engineer told him he tags documents AI;DR because if a model wrote it, a model can summarize it. He adds that performance reviews have become largely AI driven, with AI writing feedback and other AI summarizing it.
Huynh does not argue for banning AI. He proposes that AI be used freely for decisions that are easy to reverse, while people write and read documents for decisions that are hard to undo, and that authors own every word.
The Ken reported in 2025 that Amazon had rolled out internal AI writing tools and that some employees were using them to draft documents.
What to expect next
Watch whether Amazon responds or sets rules on AI written memos, as Huynh suggests, and whether other companies that copied the six page memo adopt similar policies.
Also watch for more accounts from current Amazon employees, since Huynh's are secondhand. The debate over AI written work and whether readers trust it is spreading to performance reviews, design documents and other writing that companies use to make decisions.