Learn to Go Slow Before You Can Go Fast

When I was training for marathons and triathlons, the hardest thing to accept was the slow runs. Run slow. For a long time. It doesn’t feel like progress. You’re not getting faster. You’re not hitting impressive numbers. You’re just putting in miles at a pace that feels almost pointless.

But you’re building a base. Structural capacity. The kind of foundation that lets you go fast later without breaking down.

I think about this constantly when I’m building agentic systems.

The temptation is to go fast immediately. The tools make it possible — you can stand up an agentic workflow in a day, have something working in a week. But “working” and “production-ready” are very different things. And the gap between them is exactly the structural foundation you either built or skipped.

Take the time to get the architecture right. Document the interfaces. Define the component boundaries. Set up the validation loops. It feels slow. It feels like you’re not making progress compared to the team that shipped a demo yesterday.

But when it’s time to accelerate — when you need to swap a model, scale a pipeline, add a new capability, or respond to a shift in the technology — you’ll have the foundation to do it cleanly. They’ll be rewriting from scratch.

Slow is smooth. Smooth is fast.