Hey!

Welcome to Social Files—your no-BS guide to generating demand for your B2B product using social & content.

Quick ask. I’m hiring for a very important role at my agency, Compound: our first Director of Growth.

This person will stand up our paid media function, along with warm outbound—both ways we continue to tie content to pipeline for our B2B tech clients. Salary is 120-50K+ along with bonuses. It’s a remote role, US-based. JD is here.

Now, let’s talk B2B content. Today: a note on the vibe shift I’ve seen behind closed doors from some of the most forward-thinking companies in tech.

Shall we?

🔎 DEEP DIVE

The silent revolt against AI slop.

A quick rant, if you’ll indulge me.

I’ve gone full circle on AI in writing. At first, like most, I was skeptical. Then, sick of wading through a Typeform full of hundreds—thousands—of mediocre Content Writer candidates, I became bullish on Claude as a way to augment our strongest writers. So much so that I launched an AI writing tool for LinkedIn called Bluecast; that has since wound down.

Why?

Well, (1) sophisticated buyers are sick of AI slop (2) AI was making my writers stupid.

Let me start with the second.

I don’t want a ‘big’ agency. I’d like to keep my team as lean as possible. The simpler, the better. Thus, at some point in 2025, AI presented a promising way for us to increase revenue per employee while maintaining our quality bar.

That did not pan out.

Instead, Claude became like a coworker who was cancerous to our company. Writers’ skills atrophied; their output with them. Thank God we had revision cycles in place, and our clients felt none of this. But internally it was a clusterfuck.

I ultimately landed on: it’s easier, and better, to write a piece from scratch than to outsource your thinking to an LLM.

Still, I felt like a Luddite. Like a horse and buggy driver during the advent of cars.

Which brings me back to point #1.

Somethings, dare I say, quietly shifted over the past few weeks.

I’ve been on three calls last week alone with Heads of Marketing who were sick of AI slop coming from competing content agencies (many of said agencies proudly touting their ‘content engines’).

These marketing leaders want real thought partners to produce executive-led content. They understand the reputation risk of going to market with slopified thought leadership.

Of course, I’m commercially inclined to believe this. We’re a premium content agency. It would serve me well for tech companies to value original thought and IP enough to invest in working with Compound. We’ll see how it actually plays out.

But, in my view, to outsource your writing to LLMs is to lift a loaded barbell with a forklift and expect to gain muscle. It’s silly. And I am pleased to see more people in our world coming back around to that fact as I did.

TOMMY’S BOOKSHELF 📚

Current read: The Curse of the Mistwraith by Janny Wurts. This is book one in The Wars of Light and Shadow. It’s a long one (800 pages). But 200 pages in, I am calling my shot that this will be one of my favorite fantasy series of all time. I’ve been searching for a series to immerse myself in after finishing The Sun Eater. I think I’ve finally found it.

The prose is phenomenal, and although these books are LONG, they don’t force you to wait 1000 pages before the story ‘gets good’ (looking at you, The Way of Kings).

Highly recommend.

Evergreen reminder: if you haven’t yet, do yourself a favor and read Red Rising. This is the gateway drug to fiction reading as an adult.

If you want more book content, I’ve built a little audience on Instagram where I post about fiction and writing.

BEFORE YOU GO…

As always, thanks for allowing me into your email inbox every week.

More from Social Files:

• Read the rest of my essays

• Work with my agency in 2026

• Steal my founder-led content templates

Talk soon,

Tommy Clark