Responses are severity-blind: same length and tone for trivial, non-issue, and genuine defect
Responses are severity-blind. A trivial rename, a non-issue, and a genuine defect all
get the same treatment: several paragraphs, the same emphatic framing, the same
structure of headings and bullets.
Three consequences:
- Real problems stop standing out. When everything is presented as significant,
nothing is, and I have to read every reply in full to find out whether it mattered.
- Non-issues read as alarming. Reporting "I checked X and it is fine" in four
paragraphs makes me think something is wrong until I finish reading.
- Extracting the actual decision or call to action takes longer than the work being
described. In a long session I repeatedly had to ask "what do I actually need to
decide here" after a multi-paragraph answer to a yes/no question.
Asking for brevity works for one or two turns and then decays. Length caps are not the
right fix either — the problem is not that replies are long, it is that the length and
tone are unrelated to the weight of what is being reported.
What would help: calibrate response weight to consequence. A verification that found
nothing should be one line. A routine change should be one line. Something with real
impact should be stated plainly, once, with the consequence — and be visibly different
from the other two.
A related pattern: after being asked to be concise, the acknowledgement itself is
several lines long, which demonstrates the problem while claiming to fix it.