Speed on the reversible, ceremony on the irreversible

Once you have sorted your actions into reversible and irreversible, the rule writes itself: move fast on the things you can undo, and add ceremony to the things you cannot. The reason I keep hammering this is that most people, including me before I learned it, get the two backwards.

Here is backwards. They are cautious and slow on reversible work, reviewing a throwaway script for twenty minutes, second-guessing a branch they could delete in one command. Then they are fast and loose on irreversible work, firing off the production deploy at 2am or approving a payment because the model sounded confident. They spend their carefulness where it is cheap to be wrong and skip it where it is catastrophic to be wrong.

What does "ceremony" actually mean here?

Ceremony is deliberate friction you add on purpose. A confirmation step. A second pair of eyes, human or a separate model. A dry run that shows you exactly what will happen before it happens. A required diff you have to read. None of that belongs on reversible work, where it is pure drag. All of it belongs on the one button you cannot take back.

This is why I let AI generate freely on a branch and never let it merge to production without me. The generation is reversible, so it gets speed. The merge is irreversible in effect, it is what real users see, so it gets ceremony: I read the diff, I run the build, I decide. Fast where fast is free, slow where slow is the whole point.

The frontier labs bake this into how they ship agents. An agent can read, plan, and draft all it wants at full speed, because none of that leaves a mark. The moment it wants to take an action with consequences, send, buy, delete, deploy, there is a gate. That is not the labs being timid. That is them putting the friction exactly where the blast radius is, and nowhere else.

Get this right and you feel faster, not slower, because you stop wasting caution on work that never needed it. The ceremony concentrates on the handful of actions that actually deserve your full attention.

The takeaway: Fast on what you can undo, slow on what you can't, and notice that most people burn their caution on the reversible and spend none on the irreversible.