# Move fast and break things Internal motto used at Facebook (now Meta) from its early days, coined by Mark Zuckerberg. It became the defining philosophy of Silicon Valley startup culture in the 2010s. ## The idea Shipping speed matters more than polish. If you're not breaking things, you're moving too slowly. Iteration beats perfection. Get feedback from real users as fast as possible, even if the product is rough. The underlying bet: the cost of shipping something broken and fixing it quickly is lower than the cost of shipping too slowly and missing the market window. ## The shift Facebook officially retired the motto around 2014, replacing it with "Move fast with stable infrastructure." By that point, Facebook's scale meant that breaking things had real consequences for billions of users. The broader industry followed a similar arc. As software ate the world and tech companies became critical infrastructure, the attitude shifted toward reliability, safety, and responsible engineering. "Move fast and break things" started being used more as a cautionary tale than an aspiration. ## Criticism - Prioritizes speed over safety, privacy, and user trust - Normalizes technical debt as an acceptable tradeoff - Works at startup scale but becomes reckless at infrastructure scale - Used to justify shipping without adequate testing, security review, or ethical consideration - In the age of [[Vibe Coding]] and AI-generated code, the risks of moving fast without understanding what you're shipping are amplified ## When it still applies - Early-stage products with few users where the cost of breakage is low - Internal tools and prototypes - Exploration phases where learning speed is the bottleneck - Situations where the alternative is analysis paralysis ## References - Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's internal motto (circa 2004-2014) ## Related - [[Agile Manifesto]] - [[Vibe Coding]] - [[Startup problem]]