When moving fast, talking is the first thing to break

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.

"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.

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.

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.

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.

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.