Progress over perfection or just really low standards?

Is “loosening up” or lowering our standards a good idea?

To be clear, I am in favor of embracing AI tools when it makes sense to.

What I am concerned about is the idea that we should lower our standards where it counts.

The question then is where we should be lowering our standards and where we should absolutely not?

How about efficiency for scalability? Well, if your app isn’t likely to need to scale up to millions of users in the near future, then perhaps you can drop your standards there.

How about bugs? Just silly, annoying bugs? To be honest, in the early prototype for Tech Debt The Video Game, I sent it live with some bugs, but mainly to get some feedback.

Security comes first and foremost in my opinion. Malicious attacks are more prevalent than ever. But if you're just prototyping, perhaps you can relax on this a bit, just don’t let your servers/code/etc. get weaponized against you.

As I write this, I see a pattern here. Perhaps you can set your standards lower while prototyping, but then again, no one expects a prototype to be a fully flushed out scalable, secure app.

If you are building something for production, to scale to millions of users and put food on the table for you and your team, perhaps you shouldn’t set your standards too low.

Velocity is great, but the direction you are going and the ability to sustain that trajectory without catastrophic failure are important once you have passed that ever-vital validation/prototyping phase.

With all that said, the author of this post is selling the AI equivalent of a shovel and pickaxe for this AI goldrush. It seems peculiar that they are asking their potential customers to lower their standards.

Imagine if a restaurant asked you to lower your standards for their food… seems odd, right? I don’t mean to demean the author of that post, just pointing out the opposing incentive for the seller and the buyer.

What are your thoughts?

Speaking of security, if you are looking to beef up your AWS security skills, you may want to check out my on-demand video course on O’Reilly: Zero to Hero on AWS Security: An Animated Guide to Security in the Cloud