Testing, monitoring, observability. They're rarely urgent, often skipped, and easy to dismiss when things are moving fast. But what's the real cost of deferring them, and how much can you actually get away with? This talk explores the tradeoffs of skipping traditional engineering practices in the name of speed, and what happens when you try to layer them in after a system has already scaled. It's not about dogma or checklists, it's about pragmatism, risk, and timing.