Software factory doesn’t matter without an attention factory, and if you have that you don’t even need more software.
Nobody has built a software factory
71–80 of 81 posts
Re: Nobody has built a software factory
#72I 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 always come back to see shit that I have opinions about and need to polish Definitely but can't the factory analogy still apply here? We're now workers on a factory assembly line. The assembly line still needs people to design and build machines, press buttons to operate machines, verify widgets are correct for their stage of assembly, and verify the final product is correct and ready to leave the assembly line.…
Agree with you, overall -- and it's worthwhile to learn how to setup factories at various scales of problems, and one will always be in a situation where you need to decide whether you care about a particular part of the process, or can be okay with averages.
I'm only saying that that I don't think one can automate the whole thing. After all, agents don't actually possess ... agency -- they require us to breath live into them. So at some part of the stack, there has to be a human, with an opinion, thinking about what they want.
Also: I don't aspire to be a worker, I aspire to seize the means of production.
Re: Nobody has built a software factory
#73I 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…
In your second paragraph, that was true before AI-slop, at least for me. There was enough human slop that I couldn't bother to spend my time digging through it in the hope of finding a gem.
AI makes it worse, of course, because the ratio of slop to non-slop is worse.
Re: Nobody has built a software factory
#74I 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 agree. I speak from experience because I actually went down this path for about a month. It is tempting. However, what I realized after some reflection is that there are just so many decisions that need to be made along the course of developing a product that it's never going to be possible to just one-shot it. There's a continuous feedback loop that is needed and agents aren't going to be the ones filling that role.
Re: Nobody has built a software factory
#75I 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 always come back to see shit that I have opinions about and need to polish
But isn't this the case with all code?
Re: Nobody has built a software factory
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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Re: Nobody has built a software factory
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I always come back to see shit that I have opinions about and need to polish Definitely but can't the factory analogy still apply here? We're now workers on a factory assembly line. The assembly line still needs people to design and build machines, press buttons to operate machines, verify widgets are correct for their stage of assembly, and verify the final product is correct and ready to leave the assembly line.…
Agree with you, overall -- and it's worthwhile to learn how to setup factories at various scales of problems, and one will always be in a situation where you need to decide whether you care about a particular part of the process, or can be okay with averages. I'm only saying that that I don't think one can automate the whole thing. After all, agents don't actually possess ... agency -- they require us to breath live…
> Also: I don't aspire to be a worker, I aspire to seize the means of production.
You are not alone. Let's do it!
Re: Nobody has built a software factory
#78I propose a software farm . Imagine a large multi dimensional grid. Each axis of the grid represents a spectrum of how a specific feature could be implemented. You thus have one axis per feature. Now you plot a cloud of random points all over the grid and at each point have an agent build a solution where the features are expressed according to the corresponding intensity values at the point. Now you go through and r…
not sure how effective would that be. Multiple one-shot features won't get to the point where they are all good to deliver to compare. Unless there is an infinite amount of tokens to do the same after the one-shot for each implementation which would grow exponentially.
Re: Nobody has built a software factory
#79I propose a software farm . Imagine a large multi dimensional grid. Each axis of the grid represents a spectrum of how a specific feature could be implemented. You thus have one axis per feature. Now you plot a cloud of random points all over the grid and at each point have an agent build a solution where the features are expressed according to the corresponding intensity values at the point. Now you go through and r…
not sure how effective would that be. Multiple one-shot features won't get to the point where they are all good to deliver to compare. Unless there is an infinite amount of tokens to do the same after the one-shot for each implementation which would grow exponentially.
You would use LLMs baked into silicon chips.
Re: Nobody has built a software factory
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
This is rapidly becoming the damning accusation of quasi-journalism: this sounds like AI. There should be journalism classes on how to not sound like a bot.
impossible, because bots will adjust to new way of writing very quickly. at the end of the day, they will be trained with the new style