Worked examples and arguments about AI systems: how they work, implementation choices, evaluation, costs, failures and what they change about organizations.
Build a workflow around your coding agent. The dark software factory workshop connects the explanations to one runnable application, acceptance checks and a release decision.
Archive
70 articles, newest first.
1–5 of 5 articles in Dark Software Factories
Clear filters
Every station in a dark software factory is a tool an agent calls. Wrap a Python function in a typed tool contract, break it three ways, and record a receipt the factory can rerun: commit, versions, command, output and what was not checked.
Coding agents are fluent at saying they are done. In the dark factory that builds this site, every claim of progress must name the check that would end it, and a gate refuses the ones that do not. What that control catches, and what it cannot.
Every station in a dark software factory is a make-or-buy decision. Coase and Williamson worked out the answer decades before agents: buy what is generic, build what is specific to you, and keep the right to decide when the specification runs out.
As model calls get cheaper, what a dark software factory's output costs comes to be set by review time and acceptance rate, not tokens. The arithmetic, the error bar that decides a route, and the accounting that keeps it honest.
A dark software factory turns requests into tested software with no person on each change. The same pattern runs any work you can write as code. What caps it is review, not compute: the arithmetic, the control layers, and where it breaks.
Learn
Save your progress with a free account.
Checking sign-in…
Save your progress with a free account.
Pick up where you left off.
Continue learning at my deskCookie duty
The one he did not eat is a measurement cookie. Say yes and the site loads Google Analytics (GA4), which stores an identifier in your browser and lets us count which lessons get read.
Change your mind any time with Privacy choices in the footer. Read the Privacy Policy
Optional · newsletter
That is saved and settled. Separately, and this is marketing rather than measurement: Rod writes a weekly email — one lesson, one field note — sent through Kit. It has nothing to do with cookies, and skipping it costs you nothing.
We will send a confirmation email. Click the link in it and the next lesson finds you.
