The Religion of Speed
graybeard.ing
graybeard.ing
My learnings about speed:
* people tend to not measure things and when they actually do bother they tend to measure the wrong things, the things of immediate comfort
* measurements, when executed correctly, are objective with numeric evidence, thus some people are wholly incapable of measuring things for the same reasons some people cannot introspect
* people tend to guess at measures because either they are incapable or the effort is too high
* when people guess at measures they tend to be wrong more than 80% of the time and when they are wrong they tend to be wrong by multiple orders of magnitude
* measurements tend to produce micro-improvements, but those micro-improvements add up in ways that are both significant and unexpected
* if you want to go faster the most certain course of action is to modify your technology and techniques
* hiring is slow, just as adding more people to a late project makes it slower
* changes lower in the stack tend to grant both increased speed and increased flexibility. Increased scale comes from what you do with those
I don't understand what you're trying to say. What are the reasons some people can't introspect? Is it even true that some people can't introspect?
Our job is simply to work with the shell, to stop holding it back with our thrashing struggles to go faster. Trying too hard sabotages boat speed. Trying becomes striving and striving undoes itself. Social climbers strive to be aristocrats but their efforts prove them no such thing. Aristocrats do not strive; they have already arrived. Swing is a state of arrival.
—Houghton Mifflin, Mind Over Water
For example, someone in a meeting saying things lacking credibility and everyone else just goes along with it anyways. Then it snowballs meeting after meeting.
"Recall the pure joy of riding on a backyard swing: an easy cycle of motion, the momentum coming from the swing itself. The swing carries us; we do not force it. We pump our legs to drive our arc higher, but gravity does most of the work. We are not so much swinging as being swung."
I spent a good minute or two trying to picture what 'drive our arc higher' could mean during rowing, as that is not when force is exerted...
Often times our first instincts will not work, so we must observe, experiment, and try again. And not be afraid of looking foolish with our legs flailing around. Find the underlying rhythm and flow with it, not against it.
you can't measure everything, and choosing what to measure is an editorial decision that introduces bias.
The problem is that in software development, measures are rarely executed well. The things that are measurable are either not as important as things that are not objectively measurable, or they can be too easily gamed.
Consider your state of mind when you call the HVAC tech to fix your broken condensing on an August afternoon in Texas. This is how a lot of business leaders feel every day. Speed is the best way to meet uncertainty in complex domains. Unless you are fairly sure you can one shot the problem with a single commit, having a process to iterate with some expediency is important to success.
There is definitely a point where you are going too fast, but the customer will almost certainly let you know when this happens. Let them decide for you how fast is too fast.
> Real speed exists. Real speed is what happens when the work is understood, the constraints are clear, the people involved know what they’re doing, and the decisions have been made cleanly enough that execution can happen without constant re-litigation.
I think the article is arguing against speed preventing the kind of planning and alignment that makes smooth delivery possible. Rushing is probably the easiest way to make mistakes that ultimately kill projects, credibility, or at least increase the costs in relational capitol, time and morale. Defaulting to a panicked frenzied state of mind is a perfect way to fail at delivering expedient results.
Yet - not planning effectively is also a huge problem.
Not arguing against speed, just poorly-executed speed.
I've experienced enough business-critical incidents (or requests) where people across all seniority are just randomly trying stuff, making a mess, without taking time to coordinate, understand the problem, and solve it. It almost always resulted in more overall time and bigger blast radius than if we did it not out of panick.
OTOH my "slow" (I still did things fast, just not purely for the sake of looking fast) and steady approach always took me less time overall to find a proper fix. I also became known as the person who could always find the best possible fix when there's an incident/time constraint, but I also thought that was systematically bad instead of fixing the culture/process.
It's still faster to take a minute (and deep breath), understand the whole problem (incl. urgency and how that affects your solutions), and then solve it. It doesn't mean you can't keep your customers in the loop and assuage their concerns.
Here it is. It is done.
Great, now we put it on a shelf and ignore it for 6 months.
From my perspective, every time.
Edit: the last time this happened to me, they later revealed that it was going to be shelved for a year.
> There is definitely a point where you are going too fast, but the customer will almost certainly let you know when this happens.
Usually by stopping doing business with you forever.
The customer won't be able to tell you "you're going too fast", but he will tell you that stuff break. On top of that, because the rate of shipping new features doesn't necessarily match with the rate of usage of said features the moment you'll find out about it will not happen ASAP but probably sometime later, making it even harder to truly know if going fast is the right thing to do in the moment.
This is what the GP meant. They won’t spoon feed you the “you’re going too fast”, but they will give you other signals that you can, and would benefit from, interpreting as “you’re going too fast”
> There is definitely a point where you are going too fast, but the customer will almost certainly let you know when this happens. Let them decide for you how fast is too fast.
I don’t really now what customer type that would even be. Is the customer the one controlling the quality or reliability or driving the solution? How would the customer even know you’re “going too fast”? They can’t. They’ll just tell you “everything is half broken all the time, wth?” Is that how they tell you you’re going too fast?
Calling an HVAC tech to fix a broken AC is like an engineer doing a hotfix to alleviate a problem. No one is saying that should take 6 month. A better analogy is expecting the your home builder to build you the house in few days because it’s Texas in August and the sun is too hot outside. Then spending the next 6 years fixing “issues” in the house that was built in a week. Yeah, they didn’t put insulation. Yeah, they run the electrical wiring on the outside. Yeah, the walls aren’t anchored, and plumbing just dumps everything under the house. But at least you’re not in the hot sun.
Please define viable solution. It's like a piece of string: how long is it? It's a very subjective statement "6 weeks to find a viable solution" - could just as well be 6 months.
Sure you can deliver something that might seem viable and the customer might also a cycle of updates as the viable solution becomes the solution - but how many updates are tolerated and how bad are the problems in the seventh week?
Sure we dumped waterfall for agile and now we live in a constantly updating world of "viable solutions" ...
And consider your state of mind after the tech came over 6 times in a week, each time claiming to have fixed your HVAC but it keeps breaking.
The piece is titled "Religion of Speed" -- in other words speed (or apparent speed) as the guiding principle over anything else.
It says nothing even remotely like "you should take 6 months to do something that can be accomplished in 6 weeks."
And this statement:
"There is definitely a point where you are going too fast, but the customer will almost certainly let you know when this happens. Let them decide for you how fast is too fast"
is baffling to me.
In my experience (40+ years in software development) I have never had a customer/client that would be in a position to have the proper situational awareness + technical depth to make this judgement call.
And even worse I would guess that if even this was not the case that 95% of the time they would not say you're going too fast, instead they would ask to go faster.
Committing to that schedule — and really believing in that commitment — is what turns someone into the sort of person who sets arbitrary project timelines that disregard technical practicality, and then kills projects when they fail per those arbitrary timelines.
This is the fear that dictates the damned speed™: either you go up insanely fast, or you die. If your goals do not align with this approach, do not take VC money. If you want to develop things without haste, only join a startup with a proven PMF and insanely goos sales team, which takes care of hockey- stick growth so that you can concentrate on quality.
But the timelines that founders and CEOs can end up coming up with for the arbitrary subprojects/efforts they choose to pursue to try to get the company closer to giving those VCs the hockey-stick growth they demand, are much more arbitrary. Mostly in the sense that such subprojects/efforts can often be selected/pursued with no thought to the fact that either the goal is technically impossible within the chosen time budget; or, even if possible, that the effort won't demonstrate results within the chosen time budget, and so will be given up on whether or not it's working (because founders interpret absence of metrics as metrics relaying absence.)
Which is to say: if you can guarantee from before you start that a given subproject or effort will be considered "a failed experiment" — then you'd think it would be obvious that you shouldn't do that one. That you should put it on the backlog of things you can try after PMF + hockey-stick growth, when you have time to evaluate things thoroughly.
But that doesn't seem to be obvious to a lot of founders and CEOs. Many of them spend a lot of their and their employees' time setting off on efforts that everyone in the room basically already knows they'll be cancelling two weeks later, before said effort has had a chance to either succeed or fail on its merits.
The alternative is debt financing, and let me tell you, there's a lot more deadlines and urgency in there.
Startups are very hard, period. In my experience, the ones that get VC funding are a less stressful than those that don’t because you start with a generous buffer of money in the bank and you have investors who might backstop the company’s bank account if you run out. They do want returns, but bootstrapped companies also want returns too. That bootstrapped founder who sacrificed potential earnings for years to get their startup off the ground wants employees delivering fast, too.
It’s not a religion or cult. It’s the reality of startups. Something is risked to start them and the people who risk it expect a larger reward than they would have received. For VCs, that larger reward has to be better averaged returns than investing in the stock market or other investments. For founders, that large reward needs to be larger wealth than what they could have gotten working for FAANG. The pressure comes either way.
When I was in basic the instructors repeated this incessantly. About two thirds of the way through what Americans would call OCS they made us walk into "the gas hut" which is a concrete bunker-like building in the middle of a field near the rifle range.
Inside the hut is a hot plate with an old shitty skillet. Inside the skillet are pellets that give off tear gas when heated. You walk into the hut and immediately get slapped in the face by what I might charitably describe as the worst onion-eyes you've ever experienced, multiplied by at least 100.
But the training is fantastic because in that moment as I was standing there with my eyes scrunched and burning, I unconsciously whipped out the gas mask, put it on, did the proper drills with the filter and decon cream, and had no conscious recollection of having done so. The urge to rip off the mask and rub your eyes is overwhelming. The instructor told me "good drill" and sent me on my not-so-merry way.
Same thing with mag drills. You slap that forward assist without even thinking. Anyways, slow really is smooth which really is fast.
In the sharp turns, you feel like that's where you should try really hard to go fast. Because you're going so slow!
But really, it makes more sense to slow down MORE, be smooth and controlled and get the turn right. And you'll get a better drive and be faster later. slow in, fast out.
also, the math wins - going 1mph faster on the 1/4-mile straightaway works out better than going 1mph faster on the 100-foot slow turn.
Hence, in racing, the common advice to newbies is "to finish first, first you must finish".
IOW, make fewer mistakes before you try to go faster.
Going 1mph faster on the 100-foot turn may be faster overall than going 1mph faster on the 1/4-mile straightaway if the speed difference is large enough.
Ex:
- 1/4-mile at 100 mph takes 9s, at 101 mph, it will take 8.9s
- 100 ft at 20 mph takes 3.8s, at 21 mph it will take 3.2s
It means that overall, in this situation, it is better to go 1 mph more on the turn (8.9 + 3.8 > 9 + 3.2).
better instead to use the short stuff to set up for better speeds on longer parts.
oh whatever.
Getting pedantic about the simple math laid out in the metaphor seems like you have lost the plot.
From my perspective a failure point is when companies do delegate time to make things correct, but demand results from the get go. Billing and tracking becomes weird for them if you work on infrastructure, design systems, component libraries, system design etc and you have nothing to show for after 6 months or a year. "But the future development will be super fast" doesn't fly past upper management unfortunately.
That said, I’ll very deliberately make the distinction between going slow in a thorough and responsible way from just being slow in an incompetent way. Market forces are real and a consistently slow team gets canceled. To put it another way, sometimes slow is smooth and smooth is fast, and sometimes slow is just slow. The trick is knowing the difference between.
The trick is striking a balance. The article is arguing that there is little to no balance and that "apparent speed" trumps all other concerns.
Hence the use of the word "Religion" in the title.
But a lot of Managers (and the managed) think it is about managing people. Their real role is “Overseer” not Manager, and in that role their real task is to ensure you’re working harder.
We've all heard about the "make 100 clay pots", or, sometimes it's photos group vs "make 1 perfect clay pot" group.
I was just thinking out loud. You hear stories of "do 100, it beats doing 1" and "plan well and do 1, it beats doing 100", in the end... you sort of chose the stories that agree with you.
Velocity comes from being thoughtful. Thinking about thousands of dependencies and navigating towards the end goal.
In big corporations, neither speed nor velocity matter. Its mostly garbage products. There will be deadlines and these are planned for Annual Performance Review. There will always be some success story (or the milestones changed) to show that the people favored by the leaders are 'delivering' on the right 'metrics' and they need to be richly rewarded. And also this 'success' is because of the excellent 'stewardship' by them, therefore they must also be rewarded.
Ctrl-F, 'deadline'
0 result.
Oh, yeah, that's what missing from the discussion.
And without any trolling, I'm curious about what the author would have to say about this matter.
Not all "need for speed" comes from a vacuum. Is it always legit ? Should we push back ? Sure.
Do we always meaningfully, practically, realistically have a choice anyway ?
most software in the world is built by consulting companies for external customers and under their customer's deadline, thus not self-inflicted
If you fall into the fast -> unexpected -> iteration -> alignment cycle the author mentions, those estimates tend to be based on the 'fast' part only; that closes deals.
These are obvious lessons of agile management. Even if they are not absolute, maybe that post is meant as some kind of relative statement, in general, speed is a good thing. More speed than you are comfortable with.
The entire point of slowing down is so you don't do this. Understand the problem well first, so you don't waste time building something that was never viable in the first place.
The author isn't advocating for perfect. You have to understand the problem well enough to know what all of the critical assumptions are. Some assumptions will derail an entire project if you get them wrong. Others will be a minor inconvenience, at worst.
In software, having a solid handle on future architecture means you can speak to how unanticipated new features fit in. You know what parts you can skip for now, and have it not be a big deal.
I've started to wonder if many of the people obsessed with speed lack capability. If you can't build something well, you can try building something poor quickly. This certainly applies to my current employer.
Deadlines are artificial constraints (typically, some deadlines are unshakable—eg "we have to launch the payload when conditions are clear") that, imo, distract from the actual goal or task at hand.
Sadly, a deadline is more often used as an excuse to rush, and not because the deadline itself is of material consequence (e.g., meeting a vendor's production deadline is unshakable).
Instead, the more common reality is that someone in a position of limited agency uses the deadline as a sort of mental whip. This may get a result faster, but rarely is the work that was rushed solely to meet a deadline the best the team/individual was capable of. More often, you get a broken mess that now necessitates wasting more time later cleaning it up (this is the part I think traps a lot of people; it's a stealing from Peter to pay Paul situation).
When I've discussed this in the past, most misinterpret my point through too binary a lens. This isn't some hippie dippie idealist "just, like, do whatever maaan" kind of take.
Instead, it's a suggestion for those in an environment that's always "moving fast" but rarely if ever hitting the mark. This leads to papering over the obvious problem: the team or individual responsible for the bad work is rarely someone of pure incompetence and more often is just under completely imagined pressure that doesn't exist (beyond the confines of the minds involved).
I'm not naive, of course you can't blanket apply this line of thought to every situation (especially in corporate America). I'm more so angling at "have you considered that rushing is the reason everything you ship falls apart and doesn't meet its goals?"
Case in point: FedEx deployed some new dashboard software for their employees doing package handling. I came in to drop off a MacBook I was sending in for repair. While scanning it in, the system just broke (in the "it ain't doing the thing no more, ma" sense). The clerk was able to manually scan it, so skipped the system and gave me a receipt. A week later, Apple never got the laptop. I start calling around frantically, now having to do work I shouldn't be doing. It was determined that the label printed (the one I got a receipt for) wasn't the "correct" label to scan (that was hidden under another label already on the box). This led to weeks of unnecessary phone calls re-explaining the situation to various employees, now arguing with me about a mistake FedEx made.
Eventually, Apple called it a mulligan after a month and sent me a new laptop.
My point: whatever caused the FedEx team to rush had a ripple effect of wasting inordinate amounts of time and costing Apple $5K. Why? Because whoever built that dashboard software rushed and made an otherwise simple idea into a half-working, frustrating mess. This is the type of situation I have in mind when I tell others "we need to slow down."
Like I alluded to in the post, it's not about moving slow as a matter of psychological comfort, but as a means to avoid creating messes in the present (and future) in service of an arbitrary deadline that's less rooted in necessity and more so in fulfilling the ego of whoever is in charge. That's a tough pill to swallow, I get it, but like most things, the actual problem isn't the process or reality, it's the human mind convincing itself of things that just aren't true.
load-bearing this load-bearing that
If every use of AI was like this, I perhaps wouldn't have this slight allergic reaction to it, but as it stands, this voice and rhythm has become associated with bad lazy grifting writing.
An AI won't have written that - that would imply that AIs would be criticising their overlords and masters.
I do have a suggestion for those who object to this line of reasoning: Follow the 5 why's to try and get to the source of your own reasoning and see whether it still makes more sense - in the sense of whether you end up adding to the common good
I try to kickstart reflection on this by saying things like "Some of the biggest impact I've had has been the code I chose not to write."
What can an IC do in an environment like this? If you slow down and attempt to find any clarity, you’re labeled as slow and ineffective. If you cave to the pressure and start slinging slop with the rest of them, you’re just perpetuating the spiral. Genuinely asking - how do others thread this needle?
The other project will either peter out, because they made no sense from a product point of view or because leadership lost interest. If they’re simple, can likely be done quickly with the help of AI.
It’s not a pretty answer, but AI has helped me cope with this kind of situation much better than in the past.
I also wonder if this kind of workplace is a myth. Maybe every business really is a disaster if you look close enough. Or maybe it does happen, once in a while, where a company really hits their stride, but it’s essentially random when they do.
Or, maybe I’ve just been working in disasters too long and I’m cynical, hard to say.
It’s not.
For a significant portion of corpo office work, this actually holds. Not all work critically needs perfection, most just needs to be done. The trick is to be able to discern immediately which work does not fall into that category and actually needs to be done slowly and carefully.
What we have now produces quarters/years delays (and in a lot of cases, an inevitable throwing up of the hands to move on to the next disaster/panic). It's paradoxical, certainly, but the Tortoise and the Hare is one of the most accurate fables ever written (why I keep a little tortoise figurine on my desk).
Older generations understood this and go figure, the world was far more stable. We sold that out in favor of speed and quick profit and now we're in for a serious roller coaster ride. And for what? The illusion of having moved faster in the present at the expense of stability in the future.
Incompetent people will always find a hiding spot through imitation. They will bikeshed and posture like they know what they're talking about. Then they rush anyway at the last minute and still make a mess, or they delegate to someone who will do the same.
The actual problem starts at the top of the organization. All it takes is one bad link in the chain and oversight is lost.
The inverse would be "The Religion of Slow".
I have never seen or experienced anything remotely like this in the real world.
Have you?
That's often the important part (to the perpetrators).
Their part gets done quickly. The cleanup is SEP (Somebody Else's Problem[0]).
If anything, you win by being a good second. Facebook won because it watched MySpace mistakes and fixed them.
There is even less value in being first with this AI-driven nonsense. The first mover just creates the template everyone else feeds into an LLM. You do the hard work. Someone else collects the reward.
But so many of today's market leaders were late entrants. Sometimes many years late.
More specifically, winning often means being last. Case in point: Lycos, AltaVista, Yahoo!, Infoseek... then Google. Let others rush around doing your prototyping.
They did not had to be first. They were not first either.
There's two architects, Reiser and Umemoto who wrote a book called The Atlas of Novel Tectonics about maybe 20 years ago and a sentence that always stuck with me was "in a moving world the nomad is the one standing still".
The whole cult of speed irony, like digital nomads who only ever seem to camp out in Starbucks, is that they're the most homogenous, like-minded, incapable of independent thought people you will ever meet. They'll tell you they've done 50 things and stayed in 50 countries and somehow seem less travelled than someone who just stood still. Same with the whole productivity software velocity, ship this or that crowd. They always have 20 projects but seemingly never actually do anything, or do the same thing everyone else does.
I fear it’s more perverse at times, people just don’t always understand and can’t make sense of it so they just rush to start something as it avoids admitting the truth
There was a recent petition signed by all major AI labs to slow down AI development. Would this author or you guys agree it’s a good thing?
its now super clear that AI is a step improvement in coding, mathematics and other domains. the push for AI has worked out in hindsight.
there will always be people who will parrot the METR study and claim productivity didn't increase but its best to ignore them.
The AI push is going to damage our societies for a long time
Your concern seems to be profitability of OpenAI but that’s easily falsifiable. I’m not saying it’s 100% but I’m saying if they do turn out profitable, your concern wouldn’t have been valid.
FWIW my concerns aren't only for OpenAI, it's just the poster-child of the AI bubble. SpaceX AI strategy and investment is a complete joke (the S-1 they filled is an insult to a reader's intelligence). Anthropic seems to have been more cautious but has the same fundamental economic problems. Nobody in that whole industry has a moat, the top AI vendors are way too exposed to Chinese/open-weights labs. The datacenters debt investment vehicles (SPVs) look extremely shady and made to obfuscate the underlying assets. The HBM manufacturers seem to be going through one of the most violent boom-burst cycle ever. Oracle is... doing Oracle things, I would be shocked if that company is still alive in its current form in 5y. And so on
> It's a capital misallocation problem, a number problem, that has nothing to do with subjective feelings regarding LLMs
Now you say
> I would still see the technology as anti-human and would still see the concept of an agentic economy as deeply unserious, wasteful, and risky. Not exactly sure what your point is though.
You can see how someone might be confused with this. Is it your subjective feeling? Or objective economics? I’m not interested in your subjective feelings on AI.
On objective economics: your concern would be invalid if the AI companies overall make profit. If they don’t, then you would have been right on the point of being careful.
> your concern would be invalid if the AI companies overall make profit. If they don’t, then you would have been right on the point of being careful.
No, that’s fallacious reasoning. If the AI vendors are currently profitable that doesn’t mean the concerns regarding their unsustainability is invalid, but that changes the calculus depending on the details. They could be profitable right now on paper and still be economically not viable. The core problem is that the amount of money allocated to the AI bet is completely disproportionate compared to the actual economical value of the technology. That’s where the imbalance is. The exact reasons for the imbalance can change over time, but there would still be a misallocation. The companies would need to be profitable, and/or their expenditures would need to pay off, and the overall demand needs to grow exponentially, and they need to be protected from Chinese competitive pressure, etc.
I still don’t understand your overall point
Essentially you have made your concern utterly unfalsifiable - however the material world situation pans out in AI, your concern would be validated. There's a lot of emotion in all this and its a good idea for you to separate it out from your real objective concerns.
If you do go fast and don't deprive your customers of your product but the product breaks and doesn't deliver its intended value, is that a better tradeoff?
Re: AI development, I'd say it's foolish to slow down research, but worthwhile for rollouts to the market. The time that should have been used for preparing people/businesses was wasted on fearmongering campaigns. Now we have a fire hose of slop that's out of control.
Why? Rushing.
Its not a good tradeoff if it breaks it enough that people move off your product, I obviously concede that.
Ultimately a firm should be incentivised to improve their long term profits after accounting for externalities to the world. Fast or slow is an implementation detail.
>Re: AI development, I'd say it's foolish to slow down research, but worthwhile for rollouts to the market. The time that should have been used for preparing people/businesses was wasted on fearmongering campaigns. Now we have a fire hose of slop that's out of control.
Its not clear that your subjective view of slop is reason enough for the world to slow down on AI rollout and I'm glad I don't live in a world that doesn't necessitate slowing down due to whims and fancies of a few people's subjective aesthetic takes.
Ironically for me, all the companies _do_ want to slow down their pace for reasons related to actual safety. I think you would appreciate the cause and the foresight (if any).
This is a misunderstanding of what I'm talking about. It's not about "slop" in and of itself, it's about what reality that slop inevitably creates. There's a lot of focus on the output ("ermagherd you wrote this with AI"), but very little on the ripple effects/second-order effects (people spinning up cults, ending marriages, and gambling away their money [1]). That's not just cute "look at the freaks" stuff, that's a serious, civilizational-level problem 1-2 decades out.
You're right that my subjective opinion means dick-all beyond being that of an experienced, educated user of this stuff. But I'd at least hope that people take heed of what I'm saying and start to push back when it's objectively clear that decisions are closer on the spectrum to disaster than they are to benign mediocrity.
Thank you for sharing that link, this is exactly what I'd hope to see happening behind the scenes.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2026/mar/26/ai-chat...
But on the flip side let's not pretend there is no benefit at all in being fast.
For example, there are certain situations where slowing down will only push out decisions you would take anyway. Or: You develop a fully fledged product just to find out you could have found out that no one needs it with a simple mock-up. It's good to know when it's appropriate to be fast and when not.
The entire education system is built around the assumption that speed = merit. Any time a person has to sit a test under time constraints, the most significant factor being measured is thinking speed. Not reliability, not creativity; just speed.
I have similar thoughts about 'short term thinking'; this is another religion which has quietly taken over nearly every aspect of the modern human experience.
Work takes all the volume you give it.
The best managers I worked with had at least one common feature: always giving deadlines to move things forward.
Because you don't live on an empty planet. Other companies and people also run forward.
Being slow means you will get behind. In some markets, like software, this means you won't get anything at all.
Slop is slop -- if it is AI generated slop then fine, call it out.
If it is not slop what is the point of this compulsion? It derails a lot of threads when the content is actually good.
It's like deepfakes. You only know it's AI when it's not convincing; when the deception has failed. When you're fooled, you don't know it's AI. You just think it's a video.
However I noticed that whether a team member thought for a day, or thought for a week, the result was essentially the same. The tactics may have more details but the overall plan and impact id expect was roughly the same. They had blind spots, opportunities that could make it more impactful that only came to light when they talked thru it.
So for me, it was better to touch base sooner than later and get the broad plan right, then let them figure out the details and get to it
(Note I work in marketing, not engineering)
Yes, frequent base touching, to ensure alignment on the broad contours is right, but I find yeeting a significant project with one day of planning has a tendency to turn up either requirement gaps, cross team coordination problems, or wildly inaccurate effort estimates (the classic "20 minute adventure" taking a month or two).
Now this can be fine, and in my experience management loves this approach _provided nothing unexpected happens_, but totally loses their shit when your two week effort turns into a 6 week slog with a "not sure boss" estimate for a completion date because the scope and methods are so ill defined