TLDR Tech / Founders
Why Software Factories Fail
A software factory is a coding pipeline where agents take a spec and return working code with little or no human review. The pitch borrows from lights-out manufacturing: the line runs while nobody is on the floor. HumanLayer tried it in July 2025. Three months later, a production bug dropped the team into code nobody had been reading, and the cofounder spent two weeks rewriting the core patterns. Agents can run the line. Someone still has to understand the factory well enough to know when it is drifting.
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