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It's still faster and cheaper to just build the right thing to begin with. As the old saying goes, spend your time sharpening your ax.

by mgfist1 hours ago|

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Yes, but only if you have an ax to sharpen. With a lot of things it takes trial and error to make progress. You can take this pretty up high too - sometimes it takes building multiple products or companies to get it right

by Jare1 hours ago|

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> With a lot of things it takes trial and error to make progress

Way too often that is used as an excuse for various forms of laziness; to not think about the things you can already know. And that lack of thinking repeats in an endless cycle when, after your trial and error, you don't use what you learned because "let's look forward not backward", "let's fail fast and often" and similar platitudes.

Catchy slogans and heartfelt desires are great but you gotta put the brains in it too.

by overfeed2 hours ago|

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> I suppose there is an argument that if you are building the wrong thing, build it fast so that you can find out more quickly that you built the wrong thing,

A lot of people are so enamored by speed, they are not even taking the time to carefully consider the full picture of what they are building. Take the HN frontpage story on OpenCode: IIRC, a maintainer admitted they keep adding many shallow features that are brittle.

Speed cannot replace product vision and discipline.

by fc417fc8021 hours ago|

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The outcome of that approach depends entirely on the broader process. Imagine golf but you refuse to swing with anything less than maximum strength to avoid wasting time.

Discovery is great and all but if what you discover is that you didn't aim well to begin with that's not all that useful.