How StrongDM’s AI team build serious software without even looking at the code
Last week I hinted at a demo I had seen from a team implementing what Dan Shapiro called the Dark Factory level of AI adoption, where no human even looks at the code the coding agents are producing. That team was part of StrongDM, and they’ve just shared the first public description of how they are working in Software Factories and the Agentic Moment:
We built a Software Factory: non-interactive development where specs + scenarios drive agents that write code, run harnesses, and converge without human review. [...] In kōan or mantra form: Why am I doing this? (implied: the model should be doing this instead) In rule form: Code must not be written by humans
written by humans Code must not be reviewed by humans Finally, in practical form: If you haven’t spent at least $1,000 on tokens today per human engineer, your software factory has room for improvement
I think the most interesting of these, without a doubt, is "Code must not be reviewed by humans". How could that possibly be a sensible strategy when we all know how prone LLMs are to making inhuman mistakes?
I’ve seen many developers recently acknowledge the November 2025 inflection point, where Claude Opus 4.5 and GPT 5.2 appeared to turn the corner on how reliably a coding agent could follow instructions and take on complex coding tasks. StrongDM’s AI team was founded in July 2025 based on an earlier inflection point relating to Claude Sonnet 3.5:
The catalyst was a transition observed in late 2024: with the second revision of Claude 3.5 (October 2024), long-horizon agentic coding workflows began to compound correctness rather than error. By December of 2024, the model’s long-horizon coding performance was unmistakable via Cursor’s YOLO mode.
Their new team started with the rule “no hand-coded software”—radical for July 2025, but something I’m seeing significant numbers of experienced developers start to adopt as of January 2026.
They quickly ran into the obvious problem: if you’re not writing anything by hand, how do you ensure that the code actually works? Having the agents write tests only helps if they don’t cheat and assert true .
This feels like the most consequential question in software development right now: how can you prove that software you are producing works if both the implementation and the tests are being written for you by coding agents?
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