Nobody has built a software factory • Hacker News Board

Re: Nobody has built a software factory

#41

Post by steveklabnik » Thu, Sep 03, 2026, 4:32 PM UTC

mikert89 wrote: post #32

People have, they arent putting them up for sale. Its the same with AI sales systems, if they work, they are worth far more than what they can be sold for as a product.

We are also sort of at a "bespoke factory" stage where building a factory means doing it around your specific codebase, each of which has their own needs and quirks. Just taking one of these wholesale from one company and using it at another would not work.

We'll see if in the future, as people begin software projects this way, if there is more standardization. I suspect that there's just too much going on too fast at the moment to do it any other way, a decent factory for Opus 4.8 looks very different than one good for Astra, I'd guess. And models are just one axis.

Re: Nobody has built a software factory

#42

Post by anon7000 » Thu, Sep 03, 2026, 4:32 PM UTC

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…

That blog post didn’t make a lot of sense to me. It’s saying to run CI in the merge queue. And also have CI be a script you can run locally. But also to replace CI?

Like:

> A merge queue is a script you run to push to origin/main (instead of using a PR UI like we did back in the GitHub, all-human days).

This really doesn’t capture what a merge queue is. It’s a queue of change sets to merge, and CI has to pass on each change set before it can merge. There’s still a CI process. You can’t really enforce that just by having a bash script agents run locally, you need something at a higher level to enforce it, which is… CI.

CI doesn’t have to be slow, and the author isn’t even arguing for removing the tests.

Re: Nobody has built a software factory

#43

Post by nzoschke » Thu, Sep 03, 2026, 4:34 PM UTC

zrail wrote: post #31

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 thin…

pre-commit and pre-push hooks sound smart. I like that those will work the same for any human or any harness vs harness hooks.

Then push straight to main? Or do we need GitHub to help manage the queue https://docs.github.com/en/repositories/configuring-branches...

Re: Nobody has built a software factory

#44

Post by layer8 » Thu, Sep 03, 2026, 4:35 PM UTC

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,…

The factory analogy is tenuous, because real software is always bespoke, it’s not about producing gazillion copies of the same thing. Factories are about reliability and tolerances, aspects which are inherently intractable with LLMs.

Re: Nobody has built a software factory

#45

Post by nobodyandproud » Thu, Sep 03, 2026, 4:35 PM UTC

This entire premise assumes that we can afford the factory machine.

Long term, can we? If not, what do we do once we’re addicted to the new process and it’s impossible to get out and from?

Re: Nobody has built a software factory

#46

Post by hn_submit » Thu, Sep 03, 2026, 4:35 PM UTC

I think the Japanese built a "software factory" in the 1980's, but it was staffed with humans, not LLMs (which obviously didn't exist back then).

So to say that no one has built a software factory is a strong statement...and factually incorrect.

Re: Nobody has built a software factory

#47

Post by bcye » Thu, Sep 03, 2026, 4:35 PM UTC

OccamsMirror wrote: post #38

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.

Interestingly I did not directly recognise the text as AI, but this is precisely the moment that I stopped reading.

Re: Nobody has built a software factory

#48

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Sep 03, 2026, 4:35 PM UTC

[deleted]

Re: Nobody has built a software factory

#49

Post by Kirth » Thu, Sep 03, 2026, 4:36 PM UTC

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…

> I don’t think it’s possible to build a software factory unless you truly do not care about what you’re putting out

In the article they talk of a swarm of agents autonomously speccing out the software and I can't help but wonder -- at that point, what are you creating, and for who??

Re: Nobody has built a software factory

#50

Post by 27183 » Thu, Sep 03, 2026, 4:36 PM UTC

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…

Despite the marketing, the "I" in AI doesn't (yet) stand for "intelligence". You're best off finding applications where you can easily write a rigorous, well-defined, easily evaluated acceptance criterion and then let the model, harness, etc go wild. This of course is also the case with "AI coding" technology that came before--genetic programming, NEAT, etc. It's not intelligent, and therefore limited in fundamental ways. You have to steer it to make it work. This is very fundamentally different from how factory workers operate.

Therefore I can't see how the "software factories" concept is actually feasible without a technological breakthrough. We may be no closer to it now than we were 25yr ago.