In February, StrongDM published the two rules its software development is built on:
1️⃣ Humans must not write the code.
2️⃣ Humans must not review the code.
It is called a dark factory. A factory with the lights off, because there is nobody inside.
That does not mean the factory runs with no control and no rules at all. It just means no people are involved.
Steve Yegge says human code review will be over within a year, simply because people will not be able to keep up.
From where we sit at House of Řezáč, it is partly hype. And partly it is not.
What is holding you in place
The speed of change is hype. Innovators overestimate how fast human behaviour shifts. We all have inertia.
Work is identity. When someone has been writing code for 15 years, "humans must not read the code" does not take away their tool. It takes away their profession.
People are written into contracts. Human approval sits in your audits and in your commitments to clients. Those do not get rewritten just because an agent is faster.
Time is money. Anyone selling person-days is building a factory that works against their own profit.
You cannot buy it. Not yet, anyway. Building your own dark software factory currently takes 6+ months of intensive work.
The whole thing is an experimental approach. Will it reach the mainstream? Nobody knows today.
Programming is the first swallow
The change itself is not hype. Even without dark factories, we can see work shifting in marketing, design or administration.
Nobody knows whether the dark factory concept survives. At the same time, the changes AI brings to how we work are here and they are not going away.
In July I wrote that I do not write this newsletter — I dictate it and Claude assembles it. Today that looks like progress. In a year it will be an exhibit of my own inertia. And yes, some people will not see it as progress even today. Let us talk again in a year.
Today you probably use AI for individual tasks. You write a prompt, you get a text, you edit it and move on. Around that, you still have the same processes as two years ago.
Need perspective?
Consider the book+course+cards Řež →. You will learn how to overcome inertia in yourself and in your team.
Need practice?
We train new competencies at AI Marketing Lab → and AI Design Lab →. Six live online sessions, no programming, plus recordings of every past and future cycle.
"It felt like watching someone die. Or, more accurately, it felt like watching my idea of software engineering die."
– Martin Chesbrough
Weekend reading
Treat Your Humans Better Than Your Agents
Clean documentation, fast tests, decently specified work. Companies will pay for it because of agents, having refused to do it for people for years.
