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Comment by 28304283409234 | Hacker News Reader

"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.

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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/

Dude ... don't be lame

Are you disagreeing with the explanation? I am curious why.

It makes sense to me.

Move slowly and deliberately while avoiding big mistakes. As opposed to moving fast and making big mistakes which by comparison is slower.

The philosophy that was not being understood was "move fast and break things." "Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast" was mentioned as an opposite point of view.

To then explain "slow and smooth, and smooth is fast" as a reply is to not comprehend the comment at all. Then, it ends with a link to their own blog.

the top level comment is fine. the lame guy's comment was a promotional chatgpt-generated useless tl;dr that added zero information and linked to his own blog post

It also directly answered OP's "I never did understand this philosophy."

It misunderstood my comment.

I never did understand the philosophy of _moving fast and breaking things_.

Instead I move intentionally: slow and therefore fast.

This whole thread is trainwreck. Your initial comment is three simple sentences with very little room for misunderstanding yet here we are. Then there is a comment on that comment which is self-promotion of LLM-trash published as blog post. One would think should an easy donwvote, but it is not. Then, a dude who pointed out this lame self-promotion is donwvoted into oblivion, because what? Bunch of people cannot think of three seconds and use their eyes to try to understand what's lame about that?

I'll have to switch to farming, I swear.

"this" doesn't indicate which one it's referring to. Obviously they understand the effects of "move fast and break things", so it makes sense it would refer to the other one. Doubly so they quoted one but not the other, which is often done in contexts like this to indicate you're repeating it verbatim because you don't understand it well enough to paraphrase.

In that case, scrolling down, the other replies don't get it quite right either. An alternate way of phrasing that one would be "innovation over stability/perfectionism". It came from Facebook, where users can tolerate some minor breakage, in an era when they were cranking out all sorts features and overtaking MySpace. I think the idea is generally understood to be a good thing in the startup stage where the goal is to disrupt existing competition - if you take too long to get to market, whatever you're doing might not matter anymore.

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.

People equally mistake progress for progress.

But running a thousand miles East when success lies West...

This is why I love the age of AI. The age of all the answers. Literally 42.

It has never been more clear that the hardest part of our work is asking and understanding the right question.

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?

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.

There's many such problems with it. Don't misunderstand, I do not condone it :)

Yeah, I hear you...working with your team mates is for smooth-brained chumps. Not like us 100x engineers.

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.

Reads like incompetence to me

Another way of looking at this is "getting early feedback" by failing fast.

It's another way of doing things and not necessarily incompetence.

Maybe that's an incompetent read

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.

Learning fast is probably what moving fast implies, not breaking things carelessly to let technical debt pile up to slow you down.

There was a lot of low hanging fruit at the advent of the internet. A few rich kids with some decent vision moved in and solved those problems. They then confused the ease of operating within this landscape with actual business acumen.

Not knowing _why_ you were just successful is a killer.

Your "smooth fast" may be not fast enough in grab the market as fast as possible economy.

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