The need for speed is wasting your time

Fri, 16 Oct 2026

title image credit: Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

I'm going to talk about "AI" again. Why do I do this to myself? Because it seems inescapable, tbh. "AI" hype is sucking all the air out of all of the rooms, but it is also proving to be a good foil to talk about the issues that have been with us for a long time that are now just glaringly obvious thanks to adding too much automation to the pot. Automation is like rose water, bakers, you gotta be careful or everything just ends up tasting like soap.

"I don't know why you're so negative about AI because it makes me so much faster than I was before" is a think someone said to me this week. If I'm being honest, it's probably a thing multiple people have said to me almost every week for the last year or two. "I'm so fast now" or "It's so much faster" is a very reasonable sounding benefit to claim (especially if you start ignoring metrics like quality and maintainability and internal consistency, etc, etc) but I have to ask any and all of you who are "so much faster now", so what? Why do you need to be faster? (Yes, I know, because your boss demands it, we're not gonna have that conversation today.) Who is this newfound speed benefitting? Most importantly, is this new speed worth the cost?

Design, in all it's forms, is all about trade-offs. We can do anything we want, but everything costs something. Are you really thinking about what this new speed boost costs?

Epic games announced it's new "vibe coded game launcher" (vibe coded is their words! "Programming is hard. So, instead of doing that, we vibe coded a new Epic Games Launcher" ) and I'm sure it was very fast to design and build, but also... it sucks?(watch the embedded video) So, what did that speed boost cost? What is the value, to the company or its customers, of quickly releasing a buggy piece of software that doesn't have any of the features of any of its competitors or even the thing it is replacing? Is it even really making you faster, or are you just making messes someone else has to clean up? And lest you think think this is just a software problem, let me remind you how much everyone loves all those quick to make signs and menus that seem to be at every small business now. (I'm working on a zine and a workshop about this one, stay tuned.)

Look, I'm not so out of touch to think that acknowledging that a lot of these speed doesn't serve anyone (except maybe the people at the top who don't care about what you're doing, so long as they can say you're doing it quickly to make number go up) is going to change the demands put on you by the people who pay you and maybe provide your health insurance. (unionize your workplace if you want to make those changes) But you, the one doing the work, shouldn't take "faster always better" as a given. There is value in being able to do things quickly, up to a point. Past that point where "going faster" is not more valuable than making something that doesn't suck, and unless you're one a few monopolists who can get away with enshitifying everything they do, this is going to hurt you in the near term. If you're a professional designer you're filling your portfolio full of sloppy work. Everyone falling into this trap is is alienating their customers.

Tools should work for you, and that means they should give you some tangible benefit, but it also means the cost of using that tool should be less than what you're getting out of it.

(Last week's exercise was all about speed ,in useful way, so if you missed that one, it feels very on theme with what I wrote above.)

Enough talking, let's do design!

If it's all about speed (it's not) lets practice getting fast at doing something useful this week: recognizing if an idea is worth continuing to pursue or not. Here's how this one works:

Here's what you need

• a timer (this is just your phone, remember we're all being honest about that)
• something to write ideas on and then flesh them out. That sketchbook you were going to get last week would be a good place for that, but it could be your tablet, scrap paper, the back of a menu, whatever you want to use.

Here's what you do

1. You've got some ideas so write em' down. Pick a topic, or just freestyle it, the content here isn't the point just make a quick list of whatever ideas you can come up with. Don't spend more than a minute or two on this.
2. Set your trusty timer for 3 minutes, then start fleshing out the first idea. Write more lists, write some stories, draw some doodles, whatever you gotta do, you get THREE minutes to do it.
3. When the timer goes off, pens down!
4. Look over what you did and answer this question: Does this feel like it's worth continuing? Why? (write the answer down.)
5. Move on to the next item on your list and repeat steps 2 - 4 for each item on your initial list (or until you run out of practice time)

What's the point of all of this? It turns out we are all really bad at figuring out if we're going down a dead-end path. I am not claiming you can figure this out in three minutes most of the time (sometimes you can though!) but you can start asking questions right away. The point of the questioning isn't to push you to abandon what you're doing, it's to keep you mindful about what you're doing. If you are aware of how it's going while you're in the work, instead of just focusing on getting to the end, you can adjust course if you need to. Developing the routine to start checking in with your work and yourself early is not easy, you have to really pay attention to what you're doing, but it also doesn't take long to build the habit. The faster you can realize you are not on the right track, the faster you can change things up, and there is real value in that.

More from We Beasties

• We got some new students last week but there are still available spots for new Design Lessons students! If you want a partner to help you get that practice routine set up and locked in, and help you answer "What should I practice?" sign up for a free goal-setting lesson
• It's spooky season, why not add some spooky flair to your life? grab pancake's favorite sticker

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