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.
this usually because of lack of accountability on executive level. The salary should be low and bonus to be tied to metrics 1-2-3yr from now, then they will be more careful and pragmatic about breaking things.
This describes my team to a T ... are we working at the same place?!?
We actually talk more now which helps, but it is still hard to keep up when everyone is barreling ahead doing their own thing. In addition to more talking, there needs to be a semblance of strategy that everyone is aligned on and understands their role in.
A high-agency, high-functioning team has always been a superpower, but this capability is what will make or break organizations that are trying to run lean with AI. It's a "people problem" at its core, and no amount of technology can fix that.
"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.
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.
> 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).
I agree with you in principle, but in my mind there's a slight disconnect between a proof of a theorem that can freely be built upon by the mathematical community and the social media integration no one asked for that a 5 person point-of-sale startup writes months before going bankrupt.
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.
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.
The way to view LLMs is that it is a better google search. This allows you to speak to coworkers only when they have the context you need. For other trivial things there’s AI.
Optimally you must only disturb your coworkers when necessary.
I understand there is a point where it's harmful to take time away from them, but there's a point well before necessary where you're still conservative when asking for help but it's a net benefit to take their time.
If it took you 2 hours to not bother someone for 10 minites, that's not necessary but also still net benefit.
Agree there's an optimal here. I'm saying LLM's overall reduce the need to speak to your coworkers and that's a good thing because it opens up more avenues to have interesting conversations. And not "how do you set up this repo".
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.
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.
this usually because of lack of accountability on executive level. The salary should be low and bonus to be tied to metrics 1-2-3yr from now, then they will be more careful and pragmatic about breaking things.
This describes my team to a T ... are we working at the same place?!?
We actually talk more now which helps, but it is still hard to keep up when everyone is barreling ahead doing their own thing. In addition to more talking, there needs to be a semblance of strategy that everyone is aligned on and understands their role in.
A high-agency, high-functioning team has always been a superpower, but this capability is what will make or break organizations that are trying to run lean with AI. It's a "people problem" at its core, and no amount of technology can fix that.
"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.
Your "smooth fast" may be not fast enough in grab the market as fast as possible economy.
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.
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.
Sometimes you have to go slow (talk) in order to go fast (build the right thing).
One of the most expensive learnings was: If you want to do it fast, do it slow.
Time and time again proven true.
> 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).
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.
I agree with you in principle, but in my mind there's a slight disconnect between a proof of a theorem that can freely be built upon by the mathematical community and the social media integration no one asked for that a 5 person point-of-sale startup writes months before going bankrupt.
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.
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.
The article spouts typical boomer arguments.
The way to view LLMs is that it is a better google search. This allows you to speak to coworkers only when they have the context you need. For other trivial things there’s AI.
Optimally you must only disturb your coworkers when necessary.
Disagree on the necessary only point.
I understand there is a point where it's harmful to take time away from them, but there's a point well before necessary where you're still conservative when asking for help but it's a net benefit to take their time.
If it took you 2 hours to not bother someone for 10 minites, that's not necessary but also still net benefit.
Agree there's an optimal here. I'm saying LLM's overall reduce the need to speak to your coworkers and that's a good thing because it opens up more avenues to have interesting conversations. And not "how do you set up this repo".
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.