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Nobody has built a software factory

medium.com

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31–40 of 81 posts

Re: Nobody has built a software factory

#31

Post by zrail »

nzoschke wrote: post #26

The referenced https://blog.exe.dev/replace-your-ci is resonating with me. I'm spending a relatively large amount of time waiting for CI to finish running, then clicking a button for an agent to fix failures, then waiting for CI to finish again. Might as well push that down into the core development loop. Do folks have advice for doing this in practice? Hooks in the harness? Pre-commit hooks? Different GitHub configu…

1. Make your tests as fast as practicable

2. Split out "syntactically correct" fast checks like linters into a standalone script and call it along with the slower checks in a full-check script

3. Set the fast-check script as a pre-commit hook and the full-check script as a pre-push hook.

4. Give the model instructions that it needs to run the fast-check script after every change and the full-check script when it thinks it's done.

5. Run full-check in CI.

Then you're good as long as the model doesn't bypass the pre-push hook, and even then CI will catch it.

Re: Nobody has built a software factory

#33

Post by throwaway7783 »

nzoschke wrote: post #26

The referenced https://blog.exe.dev/replace-your-ci is resonating with me. I'm spending a relatively large amount of time waiting for CI to finish running, then clicking a button for an agent to fix failures, then waiting for CI to finish again. Might as well push that down into the core development loop. Do folks have advice for doing this in practice? Hooks in the harness? Pre-commit hooks? Different GitHub configu…

we have pre-commit hooks for fast tests (under a minute on a 2024 mac), a playwright script (smoke tests) that can be run on-demand locally, including setup and cleanup (~5 minutes). And on top of this we also have CI tests pre-merge (which we may drop soon)

Re: Nobody has built a software factory

#34

Post by sarreph »

daveguy wrote: post #17
sarreph wrote: post #3

I really like the premise of this article because I am intensely interested in learning about software factories. As much as "software factory" is a buzzword, it's still SOTA and it's absolutely going to happen / keep happening in the tech industry over the next few years. However, I can't read this, not because I refuse to -- I want to -- but because my the cogs in my mind just stop whirring at all of the LLM-isms,…

Wait. It's going to happen and it's SOTA, but you can't read the article because genAI produces such garbage? Seems like a disconnect there.

LLMs being used as a tool in general (and in the future) to automate creation and maintenance of software is not mutually exclusive to one person using LLMs to create an article.

Re: Nobody has built a software factory

#35

Post by steveklabnik »

daveguy wrote: post #17
sarreph wrote: post #3

I really like the premise of this article because I am intensely interested in learning about software factories. As much as "software factory" is a buzzword, it's still SOTA and it's absolutely going to happen / keep happening in the tech industry over the next few years. However, I can't read this, not because I refuse to -- I want to -- but because my the cogs in my mind just stop whirring at all of the LLM-isms,…

Wait. It's going to happen and it's SOTA, but you can't read the article because genAI produces such garbage? Seems like a disconnect there.

writing prose and writing code are two different things

I can get good code out of LLMs. I can rarely get good writing out of them.

Maybe it's a skill issue, but it's not inherently a contradiction that they're better at some things than others. It's much easier to RL coding than writing.

Re: Nobody has built a software factory

#36

Post by rgbrgb »

nzoschke wrote: post #26

The referenced https://blog.exe.dev/replace-your-ci is resonating with me. I'm spending a relatively large amount of time waiting for CI to finish running, then clicking a button for an agent to fix failures, then waiting for CI to finish again. Might as well push that down into the core development loop. Do folks have advice for doing this in practice? Hooks in the harness? Pre-commit hooks? Different GitHub configu…

if you're using claude code, i find you can instruct it to watch the pr and iterate on ci failures. I put this in an /issue skill that completes GitHub issues in the way I like then PR's or boots dev with QA instructions if it needs a human touch/eye. to drive this, I have a higher level bash script that makes a fresh worktree off of origin/main named after the issue and spawns a claude session running /issue.

i'm not at the point where I'd go totally hands-off with code review / QA, so this setup is the right balance of automation for my current read on agent capability.

Re: Nobody has built a software factory

#38

Post by OccamsMirror »

sarreph wrote: post #3

I really like the premise of this article because I am intensely interested in learning about software factories. As much as "software factory" is a buzzword, it's still SOTA and it's absolutely going to happen / keep happening in the tech industry over the next few years. However, I can't read this, not because I refuse to -- I want to -- but because my the cogs in my mind just stop whirring at all of the LLM-isms,…

As soon as I read this: "Everyone Bought the Motor. Ford Rebuilt the Floor." my brain recoiled and I did not want to continue reading it.

Re: Nobody has built a software factory

#39

Post by [deleted] »

mccoyb wrote: post #21

I don’t think it’s possible to build a software factory unless you truly do not care about what you’re putting out. Agent swarms, self learning, Ralph loops, execution DAGs, spending hours trying to convey my preferences into skills, yada yada — the reality is that no matter how long I spend trying to close the amortization gap between my expertise and (insert autonomous agent loop) … I always come back to see shit t…

[deleted]

Re: Nobody has built a software factory

#40

Post by pahkah »

sarreph wrote: post #3

I really like the premise of this article because I am intensely interested in learning about software factories. As much as "software factory" is a buzzword, it's still SOTA and it's absolutely going to happen / keep happening in the tech industry over the next few years. However, I can't read this, not because I refuse to -- I want to -- but because my the cogs in my mind just stop whirring at all of the LLM-isms,…

One tragedy of this is that I stop reading when things don't make sense. There are a few connections in the article that seem tenuous. In the past I might have thought through it, considered the situation, and realized that the author had a different perspective and, if I shifted my mindset, there was a real insight there.

Now I just assume that it's AI-slop and there's no other "way of thinking" that I can adopt to make it sensible. I'm surely missing out on learning through some human-written articles, but the volume of slop means that I can't spend all my time digging through nonsense in the hope that there's a gem of insight.

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