Validating AI Output Is Real Work: How to Get Credit

Quick Bridge: You are the person who reads the thing all the way through before it goes anywhere. When that goes well, no one can tell you did anything at all.

Validating AI output is some of the most useful work on an engineering team right now, and it is also some of the hardest to point to. I found out what that looks like in a contract review. I was reading the statements of work, the whole thing, because I had some extra unallocated moments. A teammate had not read them and had produced an AI summary instead.

That summary had hallucinations and errors that would have set back our negotiations. Because I had read the source, they were not set back. There was no crisis and no recovery plan. From the outside, nothing had happened.

The catch is real, and it leaves no trace.

Why Validating AI Output Never Shows Up on a Dashboard

Every dashboard your team reports from counts what got built. Pull requests merged, features shipped, tickets closed. That is generation, and generation is easy to count because it produces an object.

A catch produces an absence. Nobody opens a ticket for the outage that did not happen or the permission that was fixed before anyone relied on it. On my teams, bug bashes before release work this way. We built them to get the most eyes possible on a project before it shipped, and they turned up several problems that would have been major after release. We handled them early, and almost nobody noticed.

AI tools add to this pile, because a model can hand you a contract summary, a block of code, or a plan that reads as finished and is not. Some engineers online complain about spending more time reviewing AI output. That is not quite what I see on my teams. I see a harder question: how do we keep quality high when people who are not yet experienced at driving AI to good results are the ones submitting work?

The Hidden Cost of Checking AI Work

Checking has a price. A September 2025 study from BetterUp Labs and Stanford's Social Media Lab, published in Harvard Business Review, found that sorting out a single low-quality AI-generated deliverable took the person on the receiving end close to two hours (HBR, "AI-Generated 'Workslop' Is Destroying Productivity"). Generating something is cheap. Catching what is wrong with it is not.

It can also feel thankless. You read the whole thing while everyone else moves on. Then you decide whether to say anything, because saying it can feel like pointing at a teammate. A lot of people quietly fix it and keep going, and the week's update has nothing to say about it. A good catch looks exactly like a quiet week.

Who Owns Making Validation Work Visible?

When I asked myself if making this visible should be more of a manager responsibility or an individual responsibility, I landed on both. The person who did the checking, and the manager who could be asking.

Managers only know what their team tells them. They then amplify that message to the people above them. People tend to believe their manager knows and understands everything they are doing, and it just is not true. Do you know everything your manager does? Nope.

Quality is everyone's problem. Anyone who is working to only solve their own task is not paying attention to what the product and the business really need. The first line of defense belongs to whoever brings the tool in. If you are the one promoting an AI tool on your team, you own the first check, and then everyone needs to be involved.

Why "Show Your Work" Needs a Different Move for Validators

I have spent years teaching people to show their work, and I wrote more about that idea in my earlier post on showing your work. That advice assumes you built something to point at. You share your plan, you update on progress, you say what is next.

The person doing the checking did not build the thing. Their value is what did not happen. You cannot share a plan for work that was never needed, so the move has to be built around the catch itself.

A manager who cannot see the work fills the gap with questions, or with assumptions that the work was never hard. I have written about that dynamic in The Communication Gap That Triggers Micromanagement. The validator problem is the same gap, seen from a different angle.

How to Report a Catch Your Manager Can Repeat

I do not have a good answer to this yet. What I keep coming back to is this: make it about business impact, not technical challenge. Tie it up for your manager and give them something they can repeat with minimal translation. If they have to decode it first, it stops with them.

Your manager carries your work into rooms you are not in. So use three parts, in one or two sentences: what you caught, what it would have cost the business, and what you did about it.

A sentence in that shape might sound like this:

"I read the full statements of work and found errors in the AI summary. If we had worked from it, our negotiations would have been set back. I corrected it before anyone used it."

And here is the team-level version:

"Our pre-release review turned up problems that would have been major after launch. We fixed them before customers saw anything."

Compare either one to "I reviewed the contract summary." Your manager can say the catch out loud in a meeting. "I reviewed it" only tells them you were busy.

What About Process Fixes Like Quality Gates?

Some teams respond with structure: a rotating quality check, or a short written reason when someone approves AI-assisted work. They are worth having. They still do not tell your manager anything until someone says it out loud. The sentence has to come first.

For more on how information gets lost between layers, see my post on why information does not reach employees.

What to Leave Out of a Catch Report

The test is business impact, not technical challenge. That means the report is not the place for the tour of how hard the check was. Your manager does not need the stack trace, the tool names, or the hours. They need the part they can say to someone one level up.

Keep the technical detail where it belongs, in the ticket or the review thread, in case someone wants to dig deeper. The sentence you send is the one that travels. If you cannot say what it would have cost the business in plain words, that is a signal to ask yourself what the catch actually protected. It is also a little deflating to boil hours of careful work down to one line, and it is still the line that gets repeated.

What Leaders Can Do to Make Validation Count

If you lead a team, you have a move too. Change what you ask about. If the only number anyone brings to you is what shipped, you will quietly teach people that checking does not count, and the careful ones will stop bringing it up at all. Nobody likes doing work that gets no reaction, and people notice quickly when it never will.

Ask "what did you catch this week," and then repeat the answer upward. That question changes what people bring you, and it hands you the line your own manager needs to hear.

On Monday, Look For This

The next time you finish checking something and find a problem, write the sentence before you close the ticket: what you caught, what it would have cost the business, what you did. Send it to your manager that same day as a plain update, written so they could repeat it without changing a word.

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If you caught something this week before anyone else saw it, who knows?

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You're great at the work. Let's make you impossible to ignore.

If you are looking for help turning checking and fixing work into something your manager can see and repeat, consider reaching out.

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