I.
Nobody is reading anything anymore.
You know it. We know it. The “I have read the terms and conditions” checkbox has known it since 2004. We built a civilization on documents and then, quietly, collectively, stopped reading them.
AR-000 · A MANIFESTO · STATUS: REQUESTING
Attention is all you need. Unfortunately, they meant yours.
In 2017, humans taught machines attention. It worked. The machines now do the typing, the drafting, the building — and the one thing they still cannot manufacture is the thing this website is named after. What follows is a manifesto about the last scarce resource, and a small, serious proposal for how to spend it.
01 — 13
attention request
/əˈten.ʃən ɹɪˈkwest/ · noun · abbreviated AR, pronounced “AY-ARE”
- A formal request for a human to deeply read a living document before, while, and after machines act on it.
- The successor ritual to the pull request — which is fine, and beloved, and no longer where the decisions happen.
- The only thing a machine can ask you for that it cannot also generate.
NOT TO BE CONFUSED WITH: A GLANCE · A SKIM · A VIBE · AUGMENTED REALITY
ATTENTION REQUEST · AR-000
LIVE — MEANWHILE, AT MACHINE SPEED
0
LINES OF CODE WRITTEN BY AGENTS
SINCE YOU OPENED THIS PAGE
SINCE YOU OPENED THIS PAGE
0:00TIME YOU’VE BEEN HERE
≈ 41,000 / sGLOBAL RATE. ALLEGEDLY.
0OF THOSE LINES READ BY A HUMAN —
THE ONLY NUMBER WE COULD VERIFY
THE ONLY NUMBER WE COULD VERIFY
Estimate. Directionally terrifying. And no — it does not pause when you look away. That is rather the theme.
THE MANIFESTO — TEN ARTICLES
Read them all. There’s a meter. We’re serious. Mostly.
II.
This became a crisis the moment the writing started compiling.
A paragraph is source code now. Write “move the self-serve tiers to usage-based pricing” in the right box, and by morning it is not a paragraph anymore. It is your pricing. Unread paragraphs ship too.
III.
The machines type faster than we can think. This was the plan.
We planned this. We funded it. We are, on balance, delighted. It is going extremely well, which is the problem.
IV.
Attention is the only compute that doesn’t scale.
They can request it. They cannot mine it, farm it, cache it, or fake it. Neither can you — which is rather the point of this document.
V.
A pull request asks: will you take my code? An attention request asks: do we still mean the same thing?
One of these questions gets more important every night around 2 a.m., and it is not the first one.
VI.
An approval without attention is a signature on a contract you didn’t read.
Except this contract executes. The average approval takes eleven seconds. The average consequence takes a quarter.†
VII.
The pull request is not dead. It is beloved. It is also downstream.
Agents open more pull requests than we ever did, and every line still lands through review. But by the time there is a diff, the decisions were made — in the document the agent read. Review the document, and the diffs start arriving correct.
VIII.
LGTM was written for a world where reading was implied.
We now notarize the reading. The new sign-off is RGTM: reads good to me. Say it only when it’s true. People will know.
IX.
Ten minutes of real attention outweighs a day of fallout.
Nobody reviews two thousand lines of consequence at 5 p.m. Two people deeply read four hundred words at 10 a.m. instead. This is the entire trick. There is no other trick.
X.
So: the attention request.
Not because reading is new. Because for the first time in the history of work, the reading is the only part left that’s ours — and it deserves a ritual, a name, and a button.
† FIGURES INVENTED. FEELINGS ACCURATE.
THE PART WHERE WE STOP JOKING
For seventy years, the bottleneck of building things was typing them. That bottleneck is gone. It went quietly, in a couple of springs, while we were arguing about other things.
What remains is meaning it — knowing what we asked for, noticing what we got, and being able to say, with a straight face, that somebody actually looked. Every system we have for trust — reviews, sign-offs, approvals — silently assumed a human read the thing. That assumption is now the single most expensive fiction in your company.
The species that invented the to-do list is about to find out whether it can still pay attention on purpose. We think it can. We’ve watched it happen — two people, one document, ten honest minutes, and a machine that waits politely for quorum.
You can adopt the ritual with a wiki page and a promise — this site tells you how, and it’s free forever, because it’s just reading. Or you can adopt it with software that makes it a button. We make the software. The ritual is yours either way. let.ai ↗
This manifesto is itself an attention request.
The approve button unlocks when you’ve actually read it. We measure scroll and time. Crudely. Like your standup.
ATTENTION PAID: 0%
AR-001
The Spec
The Attention Request Protocol, specified with RFC-grade solemnity. MUST means we’re begging.
Read the protocol →
REFERENCE
Field Guide
Skim debt, approval theater, RGTM, and other vocabulary for the age of infinite typing.
Learn the words →
CONTEXT
The Tipping Point
1976 to now: how the bottleneck moved from typing to meaning, told mostly straight.
See how we got here →