When forced to pick between "good, fast, or cheap," I default toward good and fast. Early on, I'll swap to good and cheap and opt to pay with time, which I underprice even though it's the most valuable thing I have.
I was thinking through a small tool the other day — something to push notes back to my Attio CRM from LinkedIn, X, and the other walled gardens where most of my conversations now live. That was when the famous adage popped into my head.
I wondered: is this a real tradeoff in software now? The bars for software are changing: the expectation of quality is higher in an AI-slop world, but building is faster and cheaper than ever. Of course, price, quality, and speed are all relative in the eye of the beholder; what's expensive to a solo builder is rounding error at a seed-stage startup. But the pick-two math has shifted for everyone. You can have all three now. The constraint isn't feasibility — it's judgment. Who's building, and who's deciding it's good enough.