Video · Cole Medin ·

My AI Dark Factory Dream Is Dead (Here's What Actually Works)

Cole Medin explains why the 'AI dark factory' - the most autonomous form of agentic engineering, where agents are handed a high-level document for an epic or release and figure out how to build, validate, and ship software straight to production - does not work, even in a hypothetical AGI world. He argues that as LLMs improve they get much better at building software but not much better at understanding human intent, so the bottleneck is always communicating what you actually want; 'LLMs can't read our minds.' He also cites maintainability concerns, noting that coding agents sprawl and cannot maintain a codebase the way humans do, referencing Dex Horthy's talk 'Why Software Factories Fail.' His inspiration was Dan Shapiro's blog post on the five levels of autonomy for AI coding, with the dark factory being level five. He has therefore shifted to an 'AI software factory' that keeps humans in the loop: he plans each release up front, runs agents in parallel through the issues, and tests everything in staging before it ships.

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