speed vs quality
The right answer changes with what you're building. Knowing which knob you're turning, and when, is the skill.
Speed and quality trade off constantly, but not evenly, and the whole skill is knowing which knob you’re turning. In early software the default should surprise you: be fast and a little sloppy almost everywhere, because the product is no longer the moat. Two people with AI can build it. Distribution is the moat now, and distribution is a race.
So most of the time, speed wins and quality is cheap to defer. While your advantage over the alternative is wide — an interactive product against a YouTube video, say — the product can be a bit shitty and it doesn’t matter; spend the time getting users instead. A borrow-against-stocks wedge has a half-life of three to six months before the big wallets build it themselves. Polish features in private during those months and you’ve lost the only race that counts. Stop coding and go sell. Bugs at a hundred rupees a month cost you nothing — you apologise, hand out a free month, and keep the user.
The exception is the handful of doors that only open one way. Money, custody, security, trust. A twenty-three-year-old team I know got hacked for twenty-three million; most people would file for bankruptcy and let a fund bankroll the next thing, but they’re paying it back. That’s a quality failure you don’t get to redo with a changelog. Anything that can lose a user’s money, leak their data, or break the trust that made them come back — that’s where you slow down and get it right the first time, because there’s no first-time-over.
So decide on purpose instead of by default. For each thing you build, ask one question: if this is wrong, do I patch it next week, or is it gone for good? If it’s patchable, ship it fast and ugly. If it’s one-way, that’s the one place quality beats speed, and you spend there what you saved everywhere else.