Ask HN: How do you envision the AI Software Factory?

Is this an over-hyped concept and we just connect the harness via MCP to Slack / Jira / ... or do you envision completely new systems like GasTown for how we produce code in the future?

A single engineer who scopes, designs, implements, and delivers on their own. So all internal-facing roles (product, design) collapse back into "software engineer" (where we started). All external-facing roles (gtm, marketing, sales) collapse into "sales engineer". Support is mostly automated and what little remains collapses into software engineer (already happened to a large extent).

Everything between instruction and working preview will collapse into the ADE. The engineer will shape working software by instructing an LLM, and be able to interact with the working software as it is developing. Reading code will be done rarely as part of debugging or analysis. Agile, product-focused companies are already operating like this.

However, the speed of software delivery will remain capped at the speed of intra-organization coordination. In other words, you can't deliver software faster than you can have meetings, handoff work, and make decisions. "Alignment" in corp-speak is already the bottleneck at 90% of companies. This is also why most companies will not be able to adapt. They can't ship faster as long as they keep product managers, meetings, and hierarchy between the builders and sellers. IMO this is why most alpha in the next decade will be had by remote senior engineers who only show up to meetings and alignment and otherwise automated everything else (already happening). That won't last forever as the AI-first, product-led organizations are going to eat everyone's lunch on a longer time scale (e.g. the one-person billion-dollar company people talk about).

Just my 2cents.

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