Discussion
When moving fast, talking is the first thing to break
28304283409234: "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.
Brajeshwar: 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/
wesselbindt: Or: how the industry ends up with about half the things they build going completely unused.
varispeed: One of the most expensive learnings was: If you want to do it fast, do it slow.Time and time again proven true.
coldtea: 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.
esafak: > 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.
loa_in_: 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.
irishcoffee: 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.
gnz11: or maybe just ask someone for help first before you go breaking stuff?
coldtea: Nah, most remain useless.Inventions that were initially useless but found application later, are still in the very small minority.
nradov: 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.
lanyard-textile: 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.
gnz11: Yeah, I hear you...working with your team mates is for smooth-brained chumps. Not like us 100x engineers.
coldtea: 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.
cratermoon: Not many startups doing novel things these days.
