An AI tool can smooth out your writing in seconds. It cannot take responsibility for what the final version says. That is the line software engineer Sophie Alpert draws in a short internal policy she published on using AI to write at work:
“You must stand behind every idea and every sentence in your docs. It is your responsibility to make sure that the entire document is representative of your own thoughts before you share it. If a reviewer asks, ‘What did you mean by this line?’, it’s not acceptable to reply with ‘Oh sorry, AI wrote that, just ignore it.’”
Who Alpert is
Alpert currently works in engineering at Clay, a company that builds tools for sales and marketing teams to automate research and outreach. She previously held engineering leadership roles at Notion, Humu, and React, a library for building website and app interfaces. She has spent years writing internal documents that other engineers rely on to make decisions, which is the exact situation her policy is written for.
What she gets right, and where it’s incomplete
Alpert’s central claim is that language does not survive editing intact: “There are no lossless transformations of natural-language text, every rewrite and rephrase changes the meaning of your writing, and if this is done by an entity that doesn’t have the most detailed mental representation of what you personally were trying to communicate, information will be lost.” An AI model rewriting your draft was never in your head. It cannot know which word you chose on purpose and which one you’d change if you reread it. That gap can produce confident text that says less than the original draft.
She also argues that “writing is thinking.” Outsourcing the document can skip decisions about structure and emphasis that help you understand the problem. A document is proof you worked through a problem, not just a deliverable to produce quickly. Her policy allows brainstorming, drafting assistance, and proofreading. The requirement is to work through the ideas and thoroughly review the result yourself.
Where the policy is thinner is on where exactly the line sits. Alpert lists acceptable uses, brainstorming, drafting assistance, and proofreading, but a lot of everyday AI writing use falls in between those categories and a full rewrite. Even tightening three sentences can shift emphasis or remove a qualification. The policy sets the right standard for accountability. It does not give you a bright line for when you have quietly stopped meeting it.
Why it’s notable
Most guidance on AI-assisted writing focuses on catching factual errors or hallucinations, cases where the model states something false. Alpert’s argument works even when everything the AI writes is technically true. The risk is losing intended meaning even when each sentence is factually correct. It just isn’t fully yours anymore, and you’re the one who has to answer for it in a meeting or a review.
What it means for builders
This applies to product specs, incident writeups, and pull request descriptions, which explain code changes before they join the project. Could you defend each sentence in a conversation without checking the original prompt? If a teammate asks what a paragraph means and your honest answer is “let me check what I asked the AI,” the document has already failed its job.
Use AI for brainstorming, drafting, or proofreading, then compare the result with your intended argument. Check structure, emphasis, and qualifications before sharing it.
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