I'm with you. Yet I've always understood 'move fast and break things' to mean that there is value in shipping stuff to production that is hard to obtain just sitting in the safe and relatively simple corner of your local development environment, polishing up things for eternity without any external feedback whatsoever, months or even years, and then doing a big drop. That's completely orthogonal to things like planning, testing, quality, taking time to think etc.
Maybe the fact that this is how I understood that motto is in itself telling.
I understand it as that too. But even then, I dislike it.
Yes, "shipped, but terrible software" is far more valuable than "perfect software that's not available". But that's a goal.
The "move fast and break things" is a means to that goal. One of many ways to achieve this. In this, "move fast" is evident: who would ever want to move slowly if moving fast has the exact same trade-offs?
"Break things" is the part that I truly dislike. No. We don't "break things" for our users, our colleagues or our future-selves (ie tech debt).
In other situations, the "move fast and break things" implies a preferred leaning towards low-quality in the famous "Speed / Cost / Quality Trade-off". Where, by decreasing quality, we gain speed (while keeping cost the same?).
This fallacy has long been debunked, with actual research and data to back it up¹: Software Engineering projects that focus on quality, actually gain speed! Even without reading research or papers, this makes sense: we all know how much time is wasted on fixing regressions, muddling through technical debt, rewriting unreadable/-manageable/-extensible code etc. A clean, well-maintained, neatly tested, up-to-date codebase allows one to add features much faster than that horrible ball of mud that accumulated hacks and debt and bugs for decades.
¹e.g. Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations is a nice starting point with lots of references to research and data on this.
Maybe the fact that this is how I understood that motto is in itself telling.