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Comment by Brajeshwar | Hacker News Reader

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/

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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.

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