Two Claims Inside "I Used a Tool"
Two people say the same sentence in a code review thread. One means: I typed the prompt, read every line that came back, rewrote half of it, and I'd put my name on what's left. The other means: I asked for a function, it looked plausible, I pasted it in and moved on. Both write "I used a tool" in the commit message. Nobody downstream can tell which one they got.
That's the whole problem. "I used a tool" reports that a tool was present. It says nothing about what the tool was present for. It covers a formula someone wrote, a formula an AI wrote, and a formula an AI wrote that someone then checked line by line, and all three come out the same sentence.
Call the two ends of that range what they are. Process disclosure: a tool sat inside a workflow I ran, did a bounded piece of it, and I still decided what "done" looked like. Product disclosure: a tool produced the artifact, and my contribution was reading it once and saying yes. Spellcheck is process disclosure. Pasting in a generated report and skimming the summary is product disclosure. Both get called "using a tool," in the same words, at the same volume.
This isn't a question of manners. The sentence carries no information, so whoever hears it has to supply the missing number, and they supply it from whatever they already believed. Someone who trusts you fills in the process reading: of course you drove it, you always do. Someone primed to distrust AI-assisted work fills in the product reading: this is a rubber stamp with your name on it. Same disclosure, same words, two different pictures of what happened, and neither picture came from you. You handed over a blank and let the listener's priors fill in the number.
That would be a minor imprecision if the range weren't wide. It isn't minor. Between "checked a formula" and "approved forty pages I skimmed once" there's a lot of room, and that room is exactly where the actual disagreements about AI-assisted work live. Everything that follows, whether to trust the artifact without a second look, whether to hold the person accountable for a specific error in it, depends on where the work actually sat in that range. "I used a tool" answers none of it.
Fields that take disclosure seriously stopped accepting this kind of blank a long time ago. A conflict-of-interest form doesn't let you write "I have some investments." It wants the ticker and the percentage, because "I have investments" is compatible with owning one share and owning a controlling stake, and the form exists to force that distinction. Financial disclosure works because the norm demands the number, not just the relationship. Tool disclosure, as currently practiced, demands the word "used" and stops there.
Some of the vagueness comes from missing vocabulary. Coding culture reached for "vibe coded" as rough shorthand for the product end of the range, and it works well enough in that one context, but it's slang for a narrow case, not a scale anyone applies to writing, research, or design more broadly. Most disclosure has nothing between "used a tool" and a paragraph of caveats nobody has time to write, so the gap gets filled by silence, and silence defaults to whichever claim is more convenient for whoever's disclosing.
None of this makes "I used a tool" a lie. It just makes it compatible with almost anything, which is a strange property for a sentence whose entire job is to tell someone what happened.