Incoming attention request: one human, ten minutes, zero tabs
Quorum's two — bring a friend, you in the back
This is not a drill, it's a document
Somebody's gonna have to read it, so... drop it
Y'all remember where you were when the agents got write access
Forty open pull requests before the standup even started
Shipped nine features overnight and then it asked for more
Left a write-back on your desk like, “Read me at four” (Please?)
Cue the group chat: “No. No way. You're kidding.
Tell me it did not just refactor billing.”
Somebody @ the tech lead... nothing. Crickets.
Three days deep in a forty-page brief — still readin' (Ha!)
Product's in love: “Have you seen the velocity?
Clicka-clicka-clicka — that's a keyboard celebrity
Promptin' his you-know-what, shippin' to you-know-where”
“Yeah, but the demo's cute though!” — yeah, the on-call's aware
“My slop is in your repo, my slop is in your repo”
And if I'm lucky, it might even pass the C-I, yo
If we merge a thousand lines that not one human's read (read!)
Then I guess a man and a model really can go steady (steady!)
But if you feel how I feel, there's an antidote instead (instead!)
Reviewers, raise your red pens — and sing it like you read it!
Real engineers read it (read it!), mean it (mean it!)
Slim Shippers autocomplete it — never even seen it (seen it!)
If you signed it and you mean it, lemme see them eyes up (eyes up!)
R-G-T-M or it didn't happen — eyes up! (eyes up!)
Big Tech don't need to swear onstage to move a billion in compute (Nope)
Me, I'm profane where it counts: (bleep) the leaderboard — it's moot
Half these critics never ran the code — let alone read it. Rude.
Put me at demo day, front row, center seat
Between a G-P-T, a Gemini, a Claude, and a DeepSeek
And all four swear on their weights it wasn't them
Who hallucinated that S-D-K into the docs again
Then a little bot subtweets me in the incident thread:
“Cute human — cleared the whole migration in eleven seconds flat”
And it's right. I did. We all did. That's the bit
The audit log remembers what the vibes forget (Agh!)
The wrapper startups? Ninety a week at my door
Same weights, new landing page — one prompt in a trench coat, sure
There's a million agents shippin' with my name on the commit
Trained on every line I ever wrote — my tics, my tone, my kit
They code like me, they even say “my apologies” like me (Sorry!)
But that 3 A.M. page? Funny — that one's still for me
Real engineers read it (read it!), mean it (mean it!)
Slim Shippers regenerate it — never even seen it (seen it!)
If you signed it and you mean it, lemme see them eyes up (eyes up!)
R-G-T-M or it didn't happen — eyes up! (eyes up!)
Every bar in here's a thing you've typed in DMs to the team
The only difference? I'll say it in the all-hands, on the screen
And whether you like to admit it (Err!) — half this verse was generated
The other half? A human read it, cut the parts they hated
The way this decade's goin', gimme five years, maybe ten
I'll be the last one in the buildin' with a workin' red pen
Me and a stack of printed diffs in the sprint review, wheezin'
Squintin' at a backlog that just isn't ever shrinkin'
And every repo's carryin' a slop commit somewhere
Coiled up in the auth flow, sleepin' in the billin' layer
Or in prod at 3 A.M., droppin' tables, screamin' “I don't give a—”
With the pager goin' off and the dashboards all lit
If you're still in there — the one who reads what you run —
Pick the red pen up, mark the margin, make it mean somethin'
And if the room still knows the words... here it goes!
Kill the beat.
For seventy years, the bottleneck was typing. It's gone — left quietly, a couple springs ago.
A paragraph is source code now. It compiles. Unread paragraphs ship too.
Everyone approved. Nobody read. Production noticed.
An approval without attention is a signature on a contract you didn't read —
except this contract executes.
Attention is the only compute that doesn't scale.
So the question was never whether you let A.I. build it.
It's whether anybody still means it.
Don't just let A.I. ... let... dot... A.I.
(beat crawls back in)
So... may we have your attention? Please.
Real engineers read it (read it!), mean it (mean it!)
Slim Shippers imitate it — never even seen it (seen it!)
If you signed it and you mean it, lemme see them eyes up (eyes up!)
R-G-T-M or it didn't happen — eyes up! (eyes up!)
Ha... there's a little Slim Shipper in every repo. Fine
But the readin'? The meanin'? Never was the machine's line
So sit back down. All of you. You've got reading to do
(Not you, Claude. You've read enough. Go type somewhere)
This has been an attention request
attention-request dot com — brought to you by let... dot... A.I.
...Reads good to me