There are three kinds of shortcut:
1. Discovered shortcuts. These are the original shortcut. They were always there, but needed to be discovered. When you cut through a yard or a canyon because it is a shorter path from point A to point B, you are using this kind of shortcut.
2. Cheating. Cheating feels like a shortcut, but really it is just cheating. Whether you are committing fraud, or stealing the answers, or “faking it till you make it”, or “moving fast and breaking things”, cheating just takes today from tomorrow and accumulates debt.
3. Jigs. Jigs are the result of mastery. They represent the opposite of cheating in that they invest today to reap tomorrow. They are farsighted where cheating is shortsighted, and they are targeted at a single problem in a single domain. If you know you are going to build a thing a hundred times, taking the time at the beginning to set up your tools correctly saves time when you actually begin to build because it makes each build identical and it endows your project with reproducibility, since the essence of a jig is the removal of variability.