Voltron

Or, Perfect is the Enemy of Good, but Good Enough turns to Shit

“Perfect’s the enemy of good. Yeah, Voltron said that.”

- Jamie Tartt (Ted Lasso, Season 4)

I love Ted Lasso. I genuinely thought I’d hate it, though. Feel good comedy that has solid life lessons? Eww… leave that sickly sweet crap on broadcast TV. But no, they’ve managed to pull off something I haven’t seen since M*A*S*H: package that stuff into a show that somehow doesn’t make a cynic like me groan at the corniness. It’s quite a feat. In Season 4, a character from the earlier seasons—the quoted Mr. Tartt—imparts that amazingly sharp-yet-dimwitted truism. Of course, it’s a quote from Voltaire, but it’s one of those lines perfectionists like myself have had quoted at is our entire lives. It encapsulates the idea of being so obsessed with achieving perfection that you never actually finish what you’re working on, be it a project or your self. Take that step back, look at what you’ve done, and realize perfect isn’t possible, and what you’ve already done is probably good to go. It’s a solid concept to get perfectionists out of their own way.

Unfortunately, the concept seems to have been co-opted by business, mutating the idea into aiming for “good enough.” In tech we hear a lot about delivering the 80%-there product, about the ability to iteratively improve over time. It’s something that only got its legs under it once software became easily update-able, especially with the Internet. A new version, a firmware update for hardware… you can iron out the kinks post launch. And conceptually, it’s still true: nail the core experience, knowing there will always be bugs to fix and improvements to ship later. However, business leaders sunk their teeth into it and missed the point. Instead of perfectionists and engineers (that venn diagram is nearly a circle) needing to let go a little in order to deliver, you’ve got people driven by capital, where “any way to do it faster and cheaper” is the mantra. These are the folks that never needed friendly advice to “stop sweating the details” but were likely the “C’s get degrees” types. No one was telling them to put less effort into the quality of the project, product, etc. because by definition they already did that. Or worse. This is the headspace that’s turned “Move Fast, Break Things” from meaning “take bold swings that disrupt the status quo before someone else does” and turned it into “the deadline is yesterday, it doesn’t matter if it’s not fully baked.”

I’ve battled both sides of this for decades in my career and personal life. I’m inherently a perfectionist, so naturally I have to step back and time-box my efforts. But in my career in design, accessibility, and human experience, fighting for quality and access is the core of what I do. So when I see things trending toward “it’s fine, they already paid for it” instead of “we tried our best, this should be good enough until our next point release!” it naturally chafes my sense of right and wrong.

It’s a slippery slope that I’ve felt like Cassandra warning about for years. With AI tools and vibe coding exploding across the workplace, the line between “worked hard, it’s good enough” and “it looks fine to me” is getting blurrier by the day. If you’ve worked closely with generative AI tools and spent any time inspecting the results with a critical eye, you know how quickly the mirage of “wow that’s pretty good” fades, and the work to fix all the drift, missteps, and fragility must begin in earnest. But when that same group— driven by profit and timelines and operating without a critical eye—sees a generative AI deliverable, they get excited because “Fast. Shiny. Cheap.”¹ Nevermind that what they’re excited about doesn’t scale, doesn’t follow or establish reusable patterns, isn’t easy to use or meet the customers’ needs, or that the underlying code is a rats’ nest of fragile, resource-gobbling garbage.

Cory Doctorow coined the term “enshittification” for the general decline of product quality inherent in our late stage capitalist society. Big companies gobble up little ones, and limit a person’s options. With fewer options, you get locked in and the companies don’t need to try as hard to make a quality product. Next thing you know, your search results are an AI hallucination tainted by projects like PoisonAI (and/or just really awful code), but what are you gonna do—stop using Google?²

Even more frightening is the influx of this attitude into the circus that is the current US government. The absolute horror story that has spawned from the DOGE project is only just getting started. Move fast, break things should never apply to the FDA, for instance. But here we are, afraid to eat lettuce due to lax inspections and “eh, it’s fine” quality control.

My dad spent the majority of my childhood as a self-employed subcontractor, a marble and granite journeyman mason by trade. I note the journeyman part because I watched this same enshittification process happen in his industry. When he got into his field after being discharged from the National Guard, he was hired as an apprentice in a unionized trade. He learned on the job how to fabricate stone vanities, countertops, and more, and how to properly install them. He got to be quite good at it. He graduated from the apprenticeship and was given journeyman status. Not long afterward, the unions for stone masons were deemed unlawful in our state—Reaganomics and “right to work” laws—and the system that had instilled my dad’s skill and craftsmanship was gone. He spent decades with a reputation as being the best countertop guy in the intermountain west. For a while, his company name was “Bowers Quality Line”. The importance of quality in his work was right there on the tin. I remember working with him during my summer breaks, learning the tricks of the trade, but also watching his incredible eye for detail. He would plan a countertop based on the exact slabs of granite or other stone to be used, making sure that any veins or quartz clusters were aligned and set in such a way that everything just flowed like one giant piece, despite having been cut and installed as many pieces. I watched and learned as he would fill the gaps between these pieces, not with silicone caulking, but with an acrylic resin he would hand mix and color-match, going so far as to draw continuations of veins in marble in this resin using dye on the tip of a toothpick. It was working with him where I learned a better truism:

Speed, Quality, or Price. You can’t have all three. You want something fast and inexpensive? The quality will suffer. Want it quick but top notch? It’s going to be expensive. Oh, and we don’t budge on quality.

- Gene Bowers

By the time I was working for my dad while going to college, I had already watched the general quality in his industry bottom out. He had high-end computer-aided fabrication in his shop, an immovable commitment to quality. But he was competing with people who were fabbing countertops in their garage with circular saws with diamond-coated blades, people who threw down some caulk or liquid nails, chucked the pieces in place, and called it good. Literal rough edges, literal gaps. These days, this is unfortunately commonplace, but it made business harder and harder for him, resulting in taking big jobs for ultra rich people who lived great distances away, just to make ends meet. When I look at the countertops in my rented home—black granite tiles with floor-tile-like grouting gaps—I shudder a bit. Yes, it works. Yes, it’s better than the plastic Formica tops that everyone had in the 70s and 80s that would burn if you set a hot pan down. But it’s not great. It’s not even good. But I’m sure someone saw the cost savings.