Dave Rupert has a theory about what breaks first when teams prioritize speed: talking to each other. The web developer argues that "moving fast" creates pressure to skip conversations and consensus-building. And he thinks AI is making it worse. "LLMs are the ultimate tool in the 'Don't talk to my coworkers' toolchain," Rupert writes. "Why talk to an expert who might tell me no, when the omniscient machine is right here?"
Skip those conversations and you get duplicate systems, incompatible code, and what Rupert calls "the time bomb of technical debt" that someone else defuses later. When developers skip talking to move faster, they skip building shared systems too. Instead of improving a design system or contributing back to a codebase, they spin up parallel structures using artificial intelligence assistance. Small differences accumulate until you've got multiple versions of the same component that don't work together.
And it goes deeper than messy merges. When junior developers consult an AI agent instead of a senior colleague, they get answers without the architectural reasoning behind them. They skip the pushback, the "have you considered..." exchanges that teach how systems work and why certain patterns matter.
That friction is how people learn to build things that last.
Hacker News commenters largely agreed with Rupert's take. One wrote that "slow is smooth, and smooth is fast." Another put it plainly: you sometimes have to "go slow (talk) in order to go fast (build the right thing)." Rupert argues that management's real job isn't pushing tickets across a board to make executives clap. It's helping organizations row in the same direction. Users don't care about your lines of code or cool project codenames.