Type: url
Original: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/7/software-factory/
Status: generated
Summary
Simon Willison writes up StrongDM’s AI team’s first public account of their “Software Factory”: non-interactive development in which specifications and scenarios drive agents, under the team’s stated rules that code must not be written by humans and must not be reviewed by humans. Most of the post is about how they gain confidence without reading the code — scenarios kept outside the codebase like a holdout set, a probabilistic “satisfaction” measure over observed trajectories, and a Digital Twin Universe of agent-built behavioural clones of Okta, Jira, Slack and Google services. He flags their stated $1,000-per-engineer-per-day token figure as the term that decides how far the pattern generalises.