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Comment by cen4 | Hacker News Reader

Sometimes its a good thing that tools slow you down. People have more time to think about what they can achieve. I vaguely remember Planning for Normandy taking 2 years or something, just cause of all the resources they had to mobilize from around the world.

Contrast with today's wars, were all the real time tech in the world is producing lot of half baked outcomes.

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A frequently repeated excuse for WWI germany is that Wilhelm II had expressed desire not to invade the west, but had been told by his military that it was too late to recall the trains. Apparently the guy in charge of the german army's logistics in 1914 wrote a book after the war to explain that not only could he have turned everyone back before the border had he only received a command to do so, but also included appendices with the timetables for doing so.

[my book with the reference is currently unavailable, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schlieffen_Plan#Der_Weltkrieg suggests it might have been Groener, Das Testament des Grafen Schlieffen: Operativ Studien über den Weltkrieg (1929)]

>Sometimes its a good thing that tools slow you down.

This has been a major learning in devops too. Sometimes you want the tool to go slow, at least to start, to give a chance to Ctrl-C when you realize you've made a mistake. A bad deploy that gets replicated to 10% of your fleet could be far better than one that goes to 100%.

Note that we got a lot of half-baked outcomes and military disasters with manual processes, too.

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