My team is currently facing this issue. We had large layoffs that cut us down to a very small size while simultaneously having new initiates pushed our way that require speed. Everyone is afraid to ask what feel like basic questions, again.. layoffs, so everything is hidden in DM's. Add on top of it the push (read requirement) from higher ups to use AI and it's simply in a terrible state.
What seem like great initiatives are being watered down because nobody can keep up, debugging issues takes so much longer because everything is changing at once, and everyone is exhausted and hardly talking to each other which feeds into a cycle of having no idea what is happening.
I'm seeing this with ideation. It's so easy now with AI to come up with a new idea in a 40 page manifest that no-one has the time to really mentally ingest. Everything is defined to the T, milestones, success measures, all of it. Things become a binary do all of this, or don't do it. There's no room for conversation.
"Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast." If you move fast _and_ you break things you just end up with a lot of broken things. I never did understand this philosophy.
You do things slowly, intentionally, again and again and again, that it becomes almost muscle memory that when the times comes for you to do it again in future, it happens smooth and is thus fast eventually.
People often mistake speed for progress. One of the best examples of this is in jiujitsu. Two beginners sparing are often moving fast, but so many of the moves are wasted effort there's no actual progress in the match. Two experts sparing can often look like a training round because every move is efficient leading them towards their goal.
The problem is, as is so often the case with our modern companies, the things that got broken were other people's things. The things that were gained were made theirs.
In other words, privatized profits and socialized costs. Again.
"Move fast and break things" is about conquering the second kind of slow. Not idealizing breaking things but not being legitimately slow tied up in bad attempts not to break things.
An old baseball coach always said “be slow, but quick!” Took me years to sort that out.
Be thoughtful, be methodical, be aware, be comfortable, and be decisive. Made a lot of sense when I caught a 2-hopper off the line at 3rd and didn’t have time to think about how to field it or where to throw.
> But I’m also pro-slowing the fuck down and doing actual human thinking before pulling a trigger … We all love dopamine, we all love seeing new ideas come to life
You can spend 100M tokens/week and generate something that is good enough for end to end demo to paying clients in 1-4 weeks depending on complexity of the project. Doing this feels like being on drugs, in that the creative process is a high, and that you will be mentally exhausted at the end of every day (the crash).
New mathematical concepts are usually published in scholarly journals so it's possible to dig them up decades later when they're needed. But most companies never publish stuff that doesn't work, and don't even make any effort to learn from it internally. So they make the same mistakes over and over again.
I am not sure for people who wrote this, did they realize most of the time these conversations are just for politics reasons? In a non cooperative environment, projects moving fast does not mean individual is moving fast or vice versa. But if you are in a cooperative environment pretty much people just act what he suggested naturally.
This isn’t related at all but it’s sure interesting how our brains evolved. When we are cognitively taxed, our ability to communicate breaks down. When we are physically taxed and doing something we are built to do (like running), conversations flow in the strangest ways. Heck, I’ve had long in depth conversations about Infinite Jest with total strangers on trail runs. It kind of makes you wonder about a whole lot of stuff we have filled our worlds with.
> When speed is the priority, there’s no incentive to improve or invest in the shared system (e.g. a design system or codebase) under a tight deadline.
These guardrails are precisely what should be laid down in advance to enable workers to run safely with AI. Write all the rules in your AGENTS file, and point your AI reviewer at it. Encode whatever you can describe algorithmically in commit hooks. This will get you 90% of the way there, and peer review will take care of the rest.
I am hopeful that AI will empower smaller companies, where there is less deadweight, and consensus can be formed more quickly. Discussing what to build is not wasted time; it's one of the few things that favors humans.
My team is currently facing this issue. We had large layoffs that cut us down to a very small size while simultaneously having new initiates pushed our way that require speed. Everyone is afraid to ask what feel like basic questions, again.. layoffs, so everything is hidden in DM's. Add on top of it the push (read requirement) from higher ups to use AI and it's simply in a terrible state.
What seem like great initiatives are being watered down because nobody can keep up, debugging issues takes so much longer because everything is changing at once, and everyone is exhausted and hardly talking to each other which feeds into a cycle of having no idea what is happening.
I'm seeing this with ideation. It's so easy now with AI to come up with a new idea in a 40 page manifest that no-one has the time to really mentally ingest. Everything is defined to the T, milestones, success measures, all of it. Things become a binary do all of this, or don't do it. There's no room for conversation.
"Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast." If you move fast _and_ you break things you just end up with a lot of broken things. I never did understand this philosophy.
You do things slowly, intentionally, again and again and again, that it becomes almost muscle memory that when the times comes for you to do it again in future, it happens smooth and is thus fast eventually.
https://brajeshwar.com/2025/slow-is-smooth-smooth-is-fast/
People often mistake speed for progress. One of the best examples of this is in jiujitsu. Two beginners sparing are often moving fast, but so many of the moves are wasted effort there's no actual progress in the match. Two experts sparing can often look like a training round because every move is efficient leading them towards their goal.
It's about trying and breaking things to find out what's working, instead of casually tip-toeing lest you break something, and wasting your time.
or maybe just ask someone for help first before you go breaking stuff?
The quote is for startup businesses, doing novel pivots, and shipping novel features.
It's not for things where you can just ask some expert to tell you what works or decide for you.
Not many startups doing novel things these days.
That's the spirit of the idea: It is meant to free you of that requirement, with the understanding that you very well may break things.
It is permission to trade inaccuracy for autonomy.
The problem is, as is so often the case with our modern companies, the things that got broken were other people's things. The things that were gained were made theirs.
In other words, privatized profits and socialized costs. Again.
Yeah, I hear you...working with your team mates is for smooth-brained chumps. Not like us 100x engineers.
Learning fast is probably what moving fast implies, not breaking things carelessly to let technical debt pile up to slow you down.
In racing the fastest laps look slow.
But slow laps also look slow.
"Move fast and break things" is about conquering the second kind of slow. Not idealizing breaking things but not being legitimately slow tied up in bad attempts not to break things.
Step two is being slow in the right way.
An old baseball coach always said “be slow, but quick!” Took me years to sort that out.
Be thoughtful, be methodical, be aware, be comfortable, and be decisive. Made a lot of sense when I caught a 2-hopper off the line at 3rd and didn’t have time to think about how to field it or where to throw.
Sometimes you have to go slow (talk) in order to go fast (build the right thing).
> But I’m also pro-slowing the fuck down and doing actual human thinking before pulling a trigger … We all love dopamine, we all love seeing new ideas come to life
You can spend 100M tokens/week and generate something that is good enough for end to end demo to paying clients in 1-4 weeks depending on complexity of the project. Doing this feels like being on drugs, in that the creative process is a high, and that you will be mentally exhausted at the end of every day (the crash).
One of the most expensive learnings was: If you want to do it fast, do it slow.
Time and time again proven true.
Or: how the industry ends up with about half the things they build going completely unused.
History of invention in the science of mathematics would show that there is nothing that's useless in the long term. It's all pieces of a puzzle.
New mathematical concepts are usually published in scholarly journals so it's possible to dig them up decades later when they're needed. But most companies never publish stuff that doesn't work, and don't even make any effort to learn from it internally. So they make the same mistakes over and over again.
Nah, most remain useless.
Inventions that were initially useless but found application later, are still in the very small minority.
I am not sure for people who wrote this, did they realize most of the time these conversations are just for politics reasons? In a non cooperative environment, projects moving fast does not mean individual is moving fast or vice versa. But if you are in a cooperative environment pretty much people just act what he suggested naturally.
This isn’t related at all but it’s sure interesting how our brains evolved. When we are cognitively taxed, our ability to communicate breaks down. When we are physically taxed and doing something we are built to do (like running), conversations flow in the strangest ways. Heck, I’ve had long in depth conversations about Infinite Jest with total strangers on trail runs. It kind of makes you wonder about a whole lot of stuff we have filled our worlds with.
> When speed is the priority, there’s no incentive to improve or invest in the shared system (e.g. a design system or codebase) under a tight deadline.
These guardrails are precisely what should be laid down in advance to enable workers to run safely with AI. Write all the rules in your AGENTS file, and point your AI reviewer at it. Encode whatever you can describe algorithmically in commit hooks. This will get you 90% of the way there, and peer review will take care of the rest.
I am hopeful that AI will empower smaller companies, where there is less deadweight, and consensus can be formed more quickly. Discussing what to build is not wasted time; it's one of the few things that favors humans.