3 ms·

As a lowly level 2 who remains skeptical of these software “dark factories” described at the top of this ladder, what I don’t understand is this: If software e

by mzg 7mo ago

As a lowly level 2 who remains skeptical of these software “dark factories” described at the top of this ladder, what I don’t understand is this: If software engineering is enough of a solved problem that you can delegate it entirely to LLM agents, what part of it remains context-specific enough that it can’t be better solved by a general-purpose software factory product? In other words, if you’re a company that is using LLMs to develop non-AI software, and you’ve built a sufficient factory to generate that software, why don’t you start selling the factory instead of whatever you were selling before? It has a much higher TAM (all of software)

pydry 7mo ago
I have the same question about people who sell "get rich with real estate" seminars.
hakanderyal 7mo ago
We are not there yet. While there are teams applying dark factory models to specific domains with self-reported success, it's yet to be proven, or generalizable enough to apply everywhere.
dist-epoch 7mo ago
Codex and Claude Code are these (proto)factories you talk about - almost every programmer uses them now. And when they will be fully dark factories, yes, what will happen is that a LOT of software companies will just disappear, they will be dis-intermediated by Codex/Claude Code.
glhast 7mo ago
Also a measly level 2er. I'm curious what kind of project truly needs an autonomous agent team Ralph looping out 10,000 LOCs per hour? Seems like harness-maxxing is a competitive pursuit in its own right existing outside the task of delivering software to customers. Feels like K8s cult, overly focused on the cleverness of _how_ something is built versus _what_ is being built.
- cheevly 7mo ago
  Software that is otherwise not feasible for humans to build by hand.
  - draftsman 7mo ago
    Example?
- maxdo 7mo ago
  essentially any enterprise software for example, surprisingly, that needs to be custom tailored and not scaled for millions of views. e.g. anything that has a high context. Youtube's of this world will not enjoy it, they will use rules of scale for billions of users. Every Dashboard Chart, Security review system, Jira, ERP, CRM, LMS, chatbot, you name it. The problem that will win from a customization per smaller unit ( company, group of people or even more so an indvidual, like CEO, or CxO group) will win from such software. The level 6 and and 7 is essentially death of enterprise software.
  - pixl97 7mo ago
    >The level 6 and and 7 is essentially death of enterprise software Enterprise software that you sell, or enterprise software you use internally? The amount of self created, self used software in enterprises is staggering, that software will still exist, and still have a massive maintenance cost. So maybe we need a better definition of enterprise software here, like externally sold software? Also a huge amount of that software still has regulatory requirements, so someone will have to sign off on it. Maybe it will be internal certification, but very often there is separation of duties on things like that where it's easier to come from a different company.
2001zhaozhao 7mo ago
Why sell the factory when you can create automated software cloner companies that make millions off of instantly copying promising startups as soon as they come out of stealth? If you could get a dark factory working when others don't have one, you can make much more money using it than however much you can make selling it
- whattheheckheck 7mo ago
  Too bad they cant
- antonvs 7mo ago
  Producing the software is only a small part of the picture when it comes to generating revenue. So far, we haven’t seen much to suggest that LLMs can (yet) replace sales and most of the related functions.
  - jillesvangurp 7mo ago
    You can do a lot of work with agents to remove a lot of manual work around the sales process. Sales is a lot of grinding on leads, contacts, follow ups, etc. And a lot of that is preparation work (background research, figuring out who to talk to, who the customer is, etc.), making sure follow ups are scheduled appropriately, etc. You still should talk to people yourself and be very careful with communicating AI slop, cold outreach and other things that piss off more people than they get into your funnel. But a lot of stuff around this can be automated or at least supported by LLMs. Most of the success with sales is actually having something that people want to buy. That sounds easy. But it's actually the hardest part of selling software. Getting there is a bit of a journey. I've built a lot of stuff that did not sell well. These are hard earned lessons. I see a lot of startups fall into this trap. You can waste years on product development and many people do. Until it starts selling, it won't matter. Sales is not a person you hire to do it for you: you have to be able to sell it yourself. If you can't, nobody else will be able to either. Founder sales is crucial. Step back from that once it runs smoothly, not before. Use AI to your advantage here. We use it for almost everything. SEO, wording stuff on our website, competitor analysis, staying on top of our funnel, analyzing and sharpening our pitches, preparing responses to customer questions and demands, criticizing and roasting our own pitches and ideas, etc. Confirmation bias is going to your biggest blindspot. And we also use LLMs to work on the actual product. This stuff is a lot of work. If you can afford a ten person team to work on this, great. But many startups have to prove themselves before the funding for that happens. And when it does, hiring lots of people isn't necessarily a good allocation of resources given you can automate a lot of it now. I'd recommend to hire fewer but better people.
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]

by mzg 7mo ago

pydry 7mo ago

I have the same question about people who sell "get rich with real estate" seminars.

hakanderyal 7mo ago

We are not there yet. While there are teams applying dark factory models to specific domains with self-reported success, it's yet to be proven, or generalizable enough to apply everywhere.

dist-epoch 7mo ago

Codex and Claude Code are these (proto)factories you talk about - almost every programmer uses them now. And when they will be fully dark factories, yes, what will happen is that a LOT of software companies will just disappear, they will be dis-intermediated by Codex/Claude Code.

glhast 7mo ago

Also a measly level 2er. I'm curious what kind of project truly needs an autonomous agent team Ralph looping out 10,000 LOCs per hour? Seems like harness-maxxing is a competitive pursuit in its own right existing outside the task of delivering software to customers. Feels like K8s cult, overly focused on the cleverness of _how_ something is built versus _what_ is being built.

cheevly 7mo ago
Software that is otherwise not feasible for humans to build by hand.
- draftsman 7mo ago
  Example?
maxdo 7mo ago
essentially any enterprise software for example, surprisingly, that needs to be custom tailored and not scaled for millions of views. e.g. anything that has a high context. Youtube's of this world will not enjoy it, they will use rules of scale for billions of users. Every Dashboard Chart, Security review system, Jira, ERP, CRM, LMS, chatbot, you name it. The problem that will win from a customization per smaller unit ( company, group of people or even more so an indvidual, like CEO, or CxO group) will win from such software. The level 6 and and 7 is essentially death of enterprise software.
- pixl97 7mo ago
  >The level 6 and and 7 is essentially death of enterprise software Enterprise software that you sell, or enterprise software you use internally? The amount of self created, self used software in enterprises is staggering, that software will still exist, and still have a massive maintenance cost. So maybe we need a better definition of enterprise software here, like externally sold software? Also a huge amount of that software still has regulatory requirements, so someone will have to sign off on it. Maybe it will be internal certification, but very often there is separation of duties on things like that where it's easier to come from a different company.

2001zhaozhao 7mo ago

Why sell the factory when you can create automated software cloner companies that make millions off of instantly copying promising startups as soon as they come out of stealth? If you could get a dark factory working when others don't have one, you can make much more money using it than however much you can make selling it

whattheheckheck 7mo ago
Too bad they cant
antonvs 7mo ago
Producing the software is only a small part of the picture when it comes to generating revenue. So far, we haven’t seen much to suggest that LLMs can (yet) replace sales and most of the related functions.
- jillesvangurp 7mo ago
  You can do a lot of work with agents to remove a lot of manual work around the sales process. Sales is a lot of grinding on leads, contacts, follow ups, etc. And a lot of that is preparation work (background research, figuring out who to talk to, who the customer is, etc.), making sure follow ups are scheduled appropriately, etc. You still should talk to people yourself and be very careful with communicating AI slop, cold outreach and other things that piss off more people than they get into your funnel. But a lot of stuff around this can be automated or at least supported by LLMs. Most of the success with sales is actually having something that people want to buy. That sounds easy. But it's actually the hardest part of selling software. Getting there is a bit of a journey. I've built a lot of stuff that did not sell well. These are hard earned lessons. I see a lot of startups fall into this trap. You can waste years on product development and many people do. Until it starts selling, it won't matter. Sales is not a person you hire to do it for you: you have to be able to sell it yourself. If you can't, nobody else will be able to either. Founder sales is crucial. Step back from that once it runs smoothly, not before. Use AI to your advantage here. We use it for almost everything. SEO, wording stuff on our website, competitor analysis, staying on top of our funnel, analyzing and sharpening our pitches, preparing responses to customer questions and demands, criticizing and roasting our own pitches and ideas, etc. Confirmation bias is going to your biggest blindspot. And we also use LLMs to work on the actual product. This stuff is a lot of work. If you can afford a ten person team to work on this, great. But many startups have to prove themselves before the funding for that happens. And when it does, hiring lots of people isn't necessarily a good allocation of resources given you can automate a lot of it now. I'd recommend to hire fewer but better people.

deleted 7mo ago

[deleted]