I Can't Tell If You're Selling Me Something

What I actually found when I stopped reading about AI and started running my own experiments. Everywhere you turn right now, someone is telling you how AI is going to transform your workflow, your team, your organization, your life. The content is relentless, and it is almost universally positive. Glowing. Evangelical, even. I'm not here to tell you that's all a lie. I genuinely don't know. That's kind of the problem. We live in a media environment where the line between advertising and information has been blurring for years, and AI is accelerating that blur in ways I don't think we've fully reckoned with. When I read a breathless LinkedIn post about how some engineering leader 10x'd their team's output with AI coding agents, I find myself asking: is this a real person sharing a real experience? Is it a paid placement? Is it content generated by the very tools being promoted? I have no way to tell. Neither do you. And it's getting worse, not better. The most qualified people to evaluate these tools honestly, the ones with enough experience to have real judgment, are also the busiest. They don't have time to write takes. Which leaves a lot of space for everyone else: the shiny-object adopters who are genuinely excited, the vendors with obvious incentives, and an increasingly murky middle ground of content that looks like an opinion but might be something else entirely. The financial relationship between a writer and the tools they're praising is almost never disclosed. And now the tools themselves can generate content praising the tools. Think about that for a second. I'm not making accusations. I'm describing a problem that I think we have a collective responsibility to sit with rather than just nodding along. The appropriate response to an information environment you can't fully trust isn't paralysis. It's going and finding out for yourself. So that's what I did. Why I finally got off the fence I've been watching this space with skepticism for a while. Being a cyn