One doc, four readers

Every big document I've ever shipped failed somebody. The executive needed four sentences and got forty pages, the engineer needed the edge cases and got four sentences. I was asking the same doc to do opposite jobs on the same day.

One document aimed at everybody lands on nobody.

The old writing advice says to picture one reader (the avatar) and write to them. Good advice. But an RFC never had one reader. It always had four, and the same page was never going to work for all of them. Four documents wearing one title.

So I write it four times. That's the fix I've landed on, simple enough to be embarrassing. Google Docs grew tabs, and there was the feature the RFC needed. One document, one title, four doors:

• The idea. One page in plain language. What we're doing, why anyone should care. For the person who needs that much and can stop there.
• The executive tab. Enough to be in the know without getting into the weeds. What decision is being asked for? What does it cost, what does it risk, when does it land? It reads in three minutes. That's the budget, three minutes.
• The implementation tab. The decisions we made and why we made them, for the person doing the building. A record of the decisions, rather than a pile of specs.
• The kitchen sink. Everything goes here. References, transcripts, dead ends, the why behind the why. Nobody has to read it, somebody will be very glad it's there.

Reading is where the money goes. I've priced this elsewhere: a person's tokens cost about a thousand times the model's, and an executive's attention is at the top of that curve. Bury their decision in implementation details and I've spent their most expensive tokens on the stuff they needed least. Wrong door. (Yes, I built a calculator for this feeling. It's called Human Tokens.)

Writing four versions used to cost enough that nobody did it. So we shipped the forty pages and called the reader lazy. Now generation is nearly free next to the reader's time. With the AI partner I build everything with, I draft the executive tab from the implementation tab in about a minute. So the work is choosing what stays. Anyone can hand over fifty pages, the gift is the five the reader actually needed.

Then we call the pile AI slop, as if the model decided what to ship. Most of it is human laziness. Someone asked for the pages and skipped their part of the work. The model will hand me fifty pages. If I ship all fifty, that's my choice. A lazy one.

Four tabs means someone took one idea, cut it four ways, decided which five paragraphs each audience needed and dropped the rest. Deciding what goes behind each door is my job, not the model's. Before, four versions meant four times an engineer's most expensive hours, and nobody was paying for that. The idea was always right, AI made it cheap.

A reader's focus is the rarest thing they give me. When someone gives my document twenty minutes, that's a gift. The tabs are how I respect it.

Can they find their door?