Welcome back to OnboardedHQ! 👋 And if you’re new around here — thank you for joining us!
Today let’s talk about the unspoken tension everyone is feeling at work right now: AI. Your manager reads your doc and says, “This is great, how did you put it together so fast?”
Your brain immediately starts running calculations. Do you say you used AI? Will they think you’re efficient, or that you can’t do your job without it? Do you just say, “Oh, it didn’t take that long”?
I personally feel the answer depends so much on your company culture (yes, it’s true that there are some companies out there that are still not cool with you using AI to make yourself more efficient!). I have felt this exact feeling, and I have made some mind maps around this that I’ll share with you today.
If you’ve felt this, you have a lot of company. In one survey from the AI Paradox, 48% of Gen Z workers said they keep their AI use quiet, and their top reasons were fear of being judged and of looking like they were cutting corners. It has been almost a year since then, but that confusion still exists today.
And I think that fear isn’t irrational and we should talk about it 👇
The research is annoyingly mixed 😬
The data tells a clear, slightly frustrating story: if you use AI to entirely do the work for you and just hand in the output, people tend to trust you less. A comprehensive set of studies by University of Arizona researchers, spanning 13 experiments with over 5,000 participants, found consistent results: revealing AI use leads to an immediate drop in trust.
So why not just stay quiet? Because trust falls even further when someone else exposes your AI use behind your back.
The secret isn’t hiding it — it’s using AI to get faster at the heavy lifting, while you own the final result. When you use AI to accelerate your workflow (like drafting boilerplates or speeding up research) and then spend your saved time validating, testing, and refining the work, that social penalty shrinks.
My mind map: confess less, own more 🧠
The question isn’t really “Did you use AI?” What your team actually wants to know is, “Can I trust this work, and can I trust you?”
Here’s how I’d sort it:
🟢 No announcement needed
This covers autocomplete, fixing your grammar, or asking it to explain an error message. Nobody announces that they used spellcheck, and even AI disclosure guidelines for open-source contributors treat trivial autocomplete as not worth flagging.
The exception is when your company or team rules say otherwise. Those always win.
🟡 Mention it, casually
This is for when AI meaningfully shaped the work, like generating a chunk of code, drafting most of a doc, or suggesting the approach you took.
Say it the way you’d mention any other tool, and focus on what you did with it.
Always follow it up with how you checked or tested the work to assure people you are ready to stand by the AI tool’s work
The social penalty shrinks when AI clearly makes sense for the task. So give the reason, not an apology.
🔴 Always be upfront
➡️ Someone asks you directly. Never lie. This is the one that can’t be walked back.
➡️ Your team has a policy. Follow it, and if you can’t find one, ask. I can assure you, you aren’t the only one wondering about this. I’d even recommend sharing the answer you get in the team message channel, like Slack. This actually shows you’re taking initiative on actively seeking clarity that everyone may benefit from.
➡️ Sensitive data is involved. Check before pasting customer data or internal code into any tool your company hasn’t approved. Take this request to your manager or your company’s legal team.
What to actually say to “Did you use AI?” 🗣️
Frame AI as the tool that helps you move faster, not the substitute that does the thinking for you.
A good sentence shows your judgment, and that’s what people are really evaluating. They want to see you take ownership of the work, even if you delegated some of it to AI, and are able to stand by it.
In a PR:
“Used Opus 5.5 max to add the retry logic. I rewrote the error handling and added tests for the cases such as …”
About a draft:
“AI got me a first draft quickly, which left more time to check the numbers against our dashboard. I found two that were off and fixed them.”
When asked how you did it so fast:
“I used Claude for the boilerplate, then I spent my time on improving it and resolving the edge cases.”
Or, mention that you used AI for research and that made the process a whole lot quicker.
📝 HQ TIP: Notice the pattern — what AI did, what you did, and how you checked it.
The real rule: never ship what you can’t explain 🚨
This matters more than any disclosure script. Engineering leaders report that juniors can ship faster than ever, but struggle to debug code they don’t understand when it breaks.
And when it breaks, “the AI wrote it” isn’t a defense you should ever use.
Your name is on the PR. Some open-source projects now state outright that you can’t submit a patch you couldn’t explain in your own words. I’d adopt that as a personal rule, whatever your company’s policy says.
📝 HQ Tip: Run the “Explain It” Test. Before you hit submit, close the AI tab and explain the work out loud in 60 seconds: what it does, why you chose this approach, and what could go wrong. If you get stuck, it’s not ready.
Figure out your team’s unwritten rules 🕵️
Every team has its own norms here, and they’re rarely written down. Before deciding how open to be:
If you’ve just joined a new company and are wondering about your company’s unwritten rules, read more about how to decode company culture, and read between the lines.
Regardless of the tools you use, know that your personal reputation is built on something older than any of these tools: people knowing your work holds up and your word is good — and that includes using AI tools responsibly.
If you’re wondering about how to build that reputation and talk confidently about your work, read my mind map about how to be more visible in your role.
Use the tools 🛠️,
Know your work inside out 🧠,
And be honest when it counts 🤝.
For those of you who are already in the Onboarded community, I am so glad to have you on board!
If this hit home, share it with a friend who may quietly be wondering the same thing 🙏
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https://onboardedhq.substack.com
I wish you a great week!
Until next time,
Sonika
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