Issue 06
The Art of Breaking Things
A field guide to productive failure.
By Levvy // Read time: 8 min
Every interesting thing I’ve built started as something broken. Not slightly off — properly, embarrassingly broken. The trick isn’t avoiding that phase. It’s getting through it faster.
Breaking things on purpose is a skill. You poke the edges of a system until it tells you what it actually is, rather than what you assumed it was. Bugs are just the system disagreeing with your mental model — and the system is always right.
So I keep a “break log”: what broke, why I thought it wouldn’t, and what I believe now. It’s the most useful document I own.
“If nothing broke this week, I didn't learn anything this week.”