The Smart Brevity People Have a New Mantra, and This One Is About AI

Mike Allen, Jim VandeHei and Roy Schwartz spent years popularising Smart Brevity, the writing discipline they built into Axios after founding the site in 2016. Their new book, Simplify, published on Tuesday, is an attempt to do the same job for working with AI.

The premise is that the technology's real value is not in producing more, but in removing what should not have been there. Use it to excise distraction, and spend the recovered time on the things you are uniquely good at.

The three-part structure

The argument runs through simplification to what the authors call amplification, and Allen is blunt about where the payoff sits.

"We came to all this the hard way, and we came to it by making mistakes," he says. "But the payoff for having this rigor and having this discipline is the third part, amplify, and that's where you cash the check for doing the hard work. That you are able to spend more time on what you're uniquely good at, and what brings you joy."

That sequencing is the whole method. The discipline comes first and is unpleasant. The benefit arrives afterwards and only if the first part was done properly.

There's no hero in this story other than you

Slop, and the trickle-down of it

The book's most transferable idea is its treatment of what the authors call slop, and notably they do not restrict the term to machine output.

Slop is low-value work, human or AI-generated, that interferes with what a person actually set out to do. Its real cost is not the time it consumes directly. It is the trickle-down: one person's unnecessary output becomes several other people's unnecessary work.

Their proposed use of AI agents follows from that. Clearing a calendar, yes. But also, more interestingly, interrogating whether a given task, menial or otherwise, needs doing at all.

That is a different proposition from the standard productivity pitch. Most AI advice is about completing tasks faster. This is about deleting them.

Where the company's own interest sits

It is worth being straightforward about the context, since the authors are not neutral observers of AI's promise.

Axios has adopted the technology enthusiastically and describes it as a moonshot for the company's growth, a characterisation that arrived days after it laid off 11 staff in March. The enthusiasm has also run through columns by VandeHei and Allen.

Allen defends the approach with an example rather than an argument. Not many of his friends, he says, are reading the classics on the beach. But one is, working through The Last of the Mohicans in hardback and using AI as a knowledgeable companion to discuss it as he goes.

That is a fair illustration of the book's better instinct. The tool is being used to deepen an activity somebody was already committed to, rather than to replace the act of reading.

The part that puts it back on the reader

The closing argument is the one that distinguishes this from most books in the category, because it declines to promise anything.

"There's no hero in this story other than you," VandeHei says. The reader has to understand the technology, approach it with eyes open, and work out where it genuinely helps. That includes being alert to its seductive quality, and to the possibility of watching the parts of your own thinking that matter most quietly atrophy.

It is an unusual note to end a productivity book on. The tool will not simplify anything by itself. It will just as readily generate the slop, at volume, and the only safeguard on offer is the judgment of the person holding it.