style: LLM polish

Author: MyNameIsTrez

_posts/2026-05-22-slow-is-smooth-smooth-is-fast.md

@@ -6,13 +6,11 @@ date: 2026-05-21 12:00:00 +0100
 
 I think a lot of low quality code gets written when programmers rush themselves, rather than taking plenty of time to consider all options. I personally think programmers often feel more rushed than they actually are, because they feel embarrassed if they spend more time on something than they would like.
 
-In a decade of reading programming blogs and watching videos, I've almost never seen anyone specifically call out this hidden personal embarrassment factor. It seems to be the elephant in the room that everyone talks around.
-
-I think most programmers are totally capable of consistently writing superb quality code, if they just allowed themselves to slow down.
+In a decade of reading programming blogs and watching videos, I've almost never seen anyone specifically call out this hidden personal embarrassment factor. It seems to be the elephant in the room that everyone talks around. My guess is it comes from a mix of impostor syndrome and social comparison: you see a colleague close tickets quickly and assume speed is what competence looks like, so you start optimising for looking fast rather than being good.
 
 The expectation at almost any company to estimate how long something will take also heavily reinforces the idea that it matters how much time a person spends on something.
 
-I know that companies have to turn a profit, but ultimately a lot of codebases and companies would be better off if they got 1 superbly polished feature in a year, rather than 3 mediocre ones. In my experience though, not that much total time is lost anyways when I take my time: reviewers can review it quicker, we have less back-and-forths, and barely any bugs get introduced that have to be fixed later.
+I know that companies have to turn a profit, but a lot of codebases would be better off with one superbly polished feature a year rather than three mediocre ones. In my own experience, not that much total time is lost when I slow down: reviewers can review it quicker, we have fewer back-and-forths, and barely any bugs get introduced that have to be fixed later.
 
 The only thing we can do is tell our colleagues and people online not to feel embarrassed for taking their sweet-ass time:
-> [slow is smooth, smooth is fast](<https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/slow_is_smooth,_smooth_is_fast>)
+> [slow is smooth, smooth is fast](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/slow_is_smooth,_smooth_is_fast)