There is a button in your productivity app, and it has sparkles on it, and I need you to understand that the sparkles are not for you. The sparkles are the universal symbol of a company that raised money it didn’t need to build something you didn’t ask for, and when you press that button, a large language model will summarize the three tasks that you wrote yourself, four minutes ago, in your own words, about work that only you understand.
This is called an “AI feature.” It is on the pricing page. It is why your subscription went up six dollars a month. And I am so, so tired of pretending this is normal.
Let me be abundantly clear: the “AI-powered” productivity app is not a product. It is a press release with a login screen. It is what happens when an entire industry runs out of ideas at the exact moment its investors demand a new one, and the result is an insult to you, an insult to the people who built the underlying technology, and an insult to the very concept of getting things done.
An industry of sparkle merchants
Look at what these features actually are. I mean actually look, past the keynote and the changelog and the breathless LinkedIn posts, and you will find the same four grifts wearing different hats.
They summarize things that did not need summarizing. “Catch up on this thread with AI!” The thread is six messages long. Two of them are emoji reactions. The summary is longer than the thread, and because you can’t trust it (and you can’t, and they know you can’t), you now read the summary and then the thread, which means the feature made reading a six-message thread take twice as long. Incredible. Revolutionary. The future of work.
They write things you then have to rewrite. You type “fix login bug,” you press the sparkle, and the machine hands you four paragraphs of confident corporate mist about “the identification and resolution of authentication-related issues, ensuring a seamless user experience.” That paragraph contains less information than the three words you typed. You wrote three words and the machine diluted them into a memo. This is not assistance. This is entropy as a service, and you are paying for it.
They predict things you already know. “Smart prioritization” looks at your job, about which it knows nothing, and declares that “fix login bug” is Medium Priority, due next week. You knew the priority. You have always known the priority. Knowing the priority was never the problem! The problem was doing the task, and the sparkle button has, at every company, in every app, politely declined to help with that.
And they let you “chat with your data,” badly. A chatbot bolted to the side of the app answers “what’s due this week?” in eight seconds, at real inference cost, occasionally inventing a meeting that does not exist, in an app that already had a view called “This Week” that loads in forty milliseconds and has never once lied to you. These people replaced a database query with an unreliable narrator and put it in the keynote.
None of it touches the work. None of it. Not one feature.
Here is the tell, and once you see it you cannot unsee it: real productivity breaks in a few well-understood places. You don’t know what to do next, or you know and don’t want to do it, or you keep getting interrupted, or you’re polishing something that doesn’t matter while the thing that does matter rots.
The sparkle buttons address none of these, because they can’t. They only ever touch the metadata of your work, the titles and labels and descriptions, because the metadata is all the app can see. The actual work, the sitting down and thinking and making something, happens in your head and your editor and your hands, far outside the app’s reach. So every one of these features is structurally condemned to rearranging the packaging while the contents go untouched. And worse, they generate work. AI text to review. AI dates to correct. AI subtasks to delete, because the model broke “fix login bug” into “1. Identify the bug. 2. Fix the bug. 3. Test the fix,” a decomposition so vacuous it would embarrass a fortune cookie. Every output is a small tax on your attention that did not exist before. That is the opposite of productivity, and everybody shipping it knows.
Why this should make you angry
Because the pitch underneath all of it is that you are the problem. That you cannot be trusted to write three sentences, pick a date, or read a paragraph. But those were never your weaknesses! You are spectacularly good at knowing what your own tasks mean. You wrote them. What you needed from your tools was speed and clarity and the basic decency to get out of the way, and what you got was a mandatory coworker who interrupts to explain your own notes back to you, slightly wrong, in the voice of a LinkedIn influencer.
And here’s the part that genuinely gets me: the technology is remarkable. I mean it. We built machines that can read contracts and translate codebases and tutor a kid through calculus, and the productivity software industry looked at one of the most flexible tools ever created and said “what if it wrote longer task descriptions?” It’s a Formula 1 engine bolted into a mall kiosk that engraves keychains. These features don’t exist because anyone traced a real person’s real day and found a place where a model would help. They exist because the word “AI” had to appear in the changelog before the board meeting. The word was the product. The word was always the product.
And every hallucinated summary teaches millions of people that this technology is a toy that lies. Bad AI features are a smear campaign against good ones, funded by the very people claiming to believe in the future.
What respect would look like
The test is brutally simple: does the feature remove work you genuinely had to do, and can you trust the result without checking it? Fail either half and you’ve built a demo, not a feature. Nearly everything with a sparkle on it fails both.
The honest alternatives aren’t glamorous. Make the app fast. Make search find things. Make capture instant so a thought becomes a task before it evaporates. If a model earns a place in that stack, it earns it silently, doing something real and checkable, not performing intelligence at you in a chat bubble.
Your task list does not need a co-author. It needs to load fast, stay out of the way, and let you leave. Anyone selling you more than that isn’t selling productivity. They’re selling sparkles, and I think it’s time we all stopped buying.