GoKawiilWhy Software Factories Fail
or: harness engineering is not enough
Note I run a company (HumanLayer) building tools in the human/agent collaboration space, so what I'm gonna say below may be a tad biased. Perhaps in spite of that, I hope you find the subject helpful or at the very least that you find it as interesting as I do. -Dex
i guess we doin loops now
We're all racing to put AI coding into production. A lot has been said about loop engineering, and the prevailing wisdom is that we should probably write more loops.1
StrongDM wrote about their lights-off software factory where no human reads code and no human writes code.
The narrative goes something like this:
You are the bottleneck. The models are good enough. Code is free. Just ship more stuff.
Ryan Lopopolo of OpenAI wrote about this in February and gave a talk in April about OpenAI's software factory, Symphony.
These people are all really dang smart and I have a ton of respect for them. But the most cynical take here would be to call this yet another excuse to pump more VC money into the slop cannon.
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