Why Software Factories Fail (or: harness engineering is not enough)

Summary

Why Software Factories Fail or: harness engineering is not enough NoteI run a company (HumanLayer) building tools in the human/agent collaboration space, so what I'm gonna say below may be a tad biased. Perhaps in spite of that, I hope you find the subject helpful or at the very least that you find it as interesting as I do. -Dex i guess we doin loops now We're all racing to put AI coding into production. A lot has been said about loop engineering, and the prevailing wisdom is that we should probably write more loops.1 StrongDM wrote about their lights-off software factory where no human reads code and no human writes code. The narrative goes something like this: You are the bottleneck. The models are good enough. Code is free. Just ship more stuff. Ryan Lopopolo of OpenAI wrote about this in February and gave a talk in April about OpenAI's software factory, Symphony. These people are all really dang smart and I have a ton of respect for them. But the most cynical take here would be to call this yet another excuse to pump more VC money into the slop cannon. Our friend Mario got up at AI Engineer Europe and begged us to slow down -- because companies that have no business having outages due to coding-agent mishaps, are, well... having outages due to coding-agent mishaps. As Matt Pocock put it, codebases are falling apart faster than they ever have before. I haven't been able to dig up any definitive data/findings from StrongDM on how that whole dark factory went. The weather-report has a few sparse updates between February and June of this year. The folks at Faros AI put out a report: since we2 all picked up these AI coding tools back in January and February, pull-request review quality is way down. More comments, longer comments, and tons of PRs getting merged with no review at all. Incidents are way up. Bugs per developer are way up. This report is more of a correlation signal than a verifiable smoking gun3, and the whole point of this post is to be wary of slop da...