A Software Factory Is Not a Dark Factory

when you have only one repo, only one product, or you are a solo builder, then it is not a problem that you are babysitting your Claude Code or cursor or codex and you provide your prompt and you go through that. But what are all those pieces you can automate is more not from the AI agent coding agent, rather it is from the engineering process. Regardless of whether you are using AI or not, the engineering process differs from issue to issue. So, for example, a bug fix, you already have a clear product detail, like hold out test for a bug, and that bug or regression has happened, then you can able to fix that. But you need to follow a certain process. How to follow that process, how to automate that process, or for example, a dependable update that okay, this package is outdated, or this package have a CVE vulnerability, so you need to upgrade it to this version. Now, how are you going to check that that update won't break anything? So these kind of issues can easily be automated without a human intervention, or the bigger bottleneck for software companies wherever I'm consulting is we are able to produce more now, we are able to code more, but what will happen to the human gate that is happening on the PR level because every engineer has different flavor and every PM have very different you know deadline in place. Then how are we make sure that whatever we are producing at mass that can that can be pushed to production faster? Yes, there are many companies which already share these details. For example, Addy Osmani delivered software factory. he mentioned light factory, dark factory. How you can build a light factory with human in the loop, and how you can build dark factory which can run autonomously, and then Uber released that they done Minions, so they call it as Minions and they deploy many autonomous coding agents that can execute in a sandbox environment, and they are able to you know deliver value with it. Again, these are all on the enterprise level on theoretical level that we are seeing that this is going on in the industry. Does software factory means we need to automate, you know, from a ticket to PR? Definitely not. Oftentimes, this is one of the biggest confusion people have, like software factory means everything needs to be automated. That is actually dark factory. it doesn't mean every company needs to automate everything and no human need to code or or review any of the architectural decisions or anything like that. Software factory means you need to set a process in a way that whatever that can be automated can be automated, and whatever that needs a human review, that will only come to your review. So you can reduce your ideal time. Like right now, if you open maybe four Claude Code terminal or six Claude Code terminal and you are writing to three, four repositories, then humanly it is possible, and you can work for eight hours with that, but there will be fatigue that you need to go, okay. What this terminal is doing, what this terminal is doing, what is going on? Oftentimes you need you you switch context and you go back and forth on what is going on. But if you set your process on the planning level, and if you set your process what can be automated? Then some of the low-level tickets, if you are planning your epics in a more granular way, then you can automate from you know planning to end, and then you can only focus on things which require actual input from you on a different repository. Then your output can be more streamlined on automation plus you know human in the loop. So this is what every factory does, like a bridge manufacturing company that that does the same with factory, whatever they can automate, they will automate whatever that needs a human verification, they will come for human verification and do it.