A jar of Gene Autry themed western imagery paired with martech chaos

Sergio Leone might have written the script: Skip the governance, bypass the testing, ship it fast and fix it later. It feels like agility but produces spaghetti you could eat alongside the campfire beans from Blazing Saddles. I once worked on a Ruby on Rails app where the most common form of documentation was “this sucks, I’ll rewrite it later.”

Nobody rewrote it later.

Somewhere in your org there’s a metaphorical needlepoint pillow that reads “Move fast and document nothing.”

Organizations built this culture.

Agile started as a reasonable idea: iterative development, fast feedback, ship and learn.

Then it metastasized.

Sprints. Standups. “Fail forward.” “Done is better than perfect.” Speed became the only virtue worth measuring.

Agile culture opened the gate. Cowboy coding rode off into the sunset.

Move fast and document nothing.

Low-code and no-code tools made everybody a developer with no chops, handed them a power tool, and told OSHA to hit the trail.

Real developers earn their discipline through pain: the grind of asymptotic progress toward completion, the slow humiliation of a code review.

In martech this is everywhere. Someone spins up a Zapier chain or sticks a tracking pixel on a landing page. Testing is a suggestion. Governance is a rumor.

The tool ships and everyone claps.

Maybe the person who built it leaves. Or forgets. And no one, not even the original builder, can explain why the conversion event fires twice on Tuesdays.

Move fast and break things. Turns out you still can.

Then AI showed up and handed everyone a faster horse. You can vibe-code an entire attribution workflow over mimosas. Effectively a black box, even to its author. “This sucks, I’ll rewrite it later” now generated by a model that won’t be around to rewrite it.

Documentation debt with a deadline.

And when you don’t know how to fix it yourself you rely on the one who wrote it. The same palooka who cannot count the Rs in strawberry and who suggests you walk to the car wash.

Commandment 7: be a good worker.

And if you still want spaghetti:

Fermented Tomato Pasta Sauce

  • 1 lb tomatoes, quartered
  • 1 Fresno chile, sliced into rings
  • ½ shallot, chopped
  • 2-4 garlic cloves, crushed and chopped
  • 2 fresh basil leaves, crumpled in your hand so they are slightly crushed
  • Salt at 2% of total weight (about 1½ tsp kosher for a standard batch, weigh if you can, salt density varies by brand)

Mix everything, pack tight into a mason jar, press down so the tomatoes start releasing liquid. Leave an inch of headspace. Seal and leave at room temperature out of direct sunlight for 2-3 days. Burp the jar daily. Taste on day 2.

Two ways to finish it:

Route 1: Blend with a glug of olive oil, serve over fresh pasta, finish with parmesan. Keeps the live cultures intact.

Route 2: Dump into a pot with olive oil or butter, simmer down, cook the pasta directly in the sauce. Deeper flavor, no live cultures.

Season to taste. Take full credit.