Detach or Die

I threw out a couple of days of work last week, and it gave me pause. Not because of the lost code or the wasted time, but because I couldn’t just move on from it so quickly. And that attachment is a liability because we’re in a world that’s moving too fast to be emotional about throwing any work away, yet here I am, still sitting with it.

Last week, I got a directive to build out a new feature. A few days deep into it, we went in a completely different direction. A tale as old as time, especially at a startup. Except something has fundamentally changed. Now you can reach almost functional in a fraction of the time it used to take, so the stakes of a direction shift feel extremely different. Thousands of lines of code can hit the cutting room floor in an afternoon. An entire frontend flow you vibe-coded before lunch, gone. Previously, a direction change meant a slight pivot, because you’d only gotten so far down the rabbit hole. The natural friction of slower production was also a circuit breaker. You couldn’t go deep enough, fast enough to need a full reversal. Now you can. And so you must.

We’ve always romanticized the startup pivot. There’s a whole mythology around Silicon Valley founders who saw the market shift and course-corrected at just the right moment. But a pivot implies you’re still moving forward, just at a different angle. What I’m describing isn’t a pivot. If anything, it’s 180 degrees. And we see this play out constantly, like six months ago, when everyone was heads down focused on prompt engineering. That lasted a couple of months before building agent harnesses completely disrupted that paradigm. So many startups are throwing out entire product visions, reversing, just to stay even a little ahead.

So, if this is the age of the reverse, have our working styles actually caught up? Have we emotionally caught up?

What I’ve seen is that the most successful people operate with a steely sense of detachment. They throw the baby out with the bathwater without flinching. Not because the work didn’t matter, but because they’ve learned to own the outcome rather than fixate on the output.

A tough pill to swallow for many, because for most of our lives, the paradigm was simple: obsess over the content, and the outcome will follow. Quality of work equaled quality of result. That made sense when producing content was slow and hard, and every piece cost you something real. But AI changed the equation. When you have something helping you with the quality, your job is no longer to protect the work. Your job is to stay locked on the outcome and be willing to throw everything else away to get there.

I’m adapting. But I’d be lying if I said it didn’t deeply unsettle me.