“Move fast and break things” is terrible advice for anything that touches money, health, or safety.
In six years building product in auto-finance, the discipline that mattered most wasn’t speed. It was: prove it’s safe before you ship it, and build the proof into the system so it can’t be skipped.
When I build AI products now, I use the same rule. Every new capability ships turned off by default. It only gets turned on after it passes a gate that proves it didn’t break the thing that already worked. Not “I think it’s fine”, a measured, automated check that fails loudly if I’m wrong.
It feels slower. It’s actually faster, because you never spend three weeks debugging a regression you shipped a month ago and forgot about.
Guardrails aren’t the opposite of velocity. They’re what lets you go fast without being reckless.