alt Hacker NewsHaving actually run some of the software produced by nearly "dark software factories," a lot of that software is completely shit.
Yegge's Beads is a genuinely good design, for example, but it's flakier and more broken the Unix vendor Motif implementations in 1993, and it eats itself more often than Windows 98 would blue screen.
I can actually run a bunch of orchestrated agents, and get code which isn't complete shit. But it's an extremely skill-intensive process, because I'm acting as product manager, lead engineer, and the backstop for the holes in the cognition of a bunch of different Claudes.
So far, the people promising completely dark software factories are either high on their own supply, or grifting to sell books (or occasionally crypto). Or so I judge from using the programs they ship.
I found it kind of fitting that didn't even describe what a human would still do at level 5 nor why it would be desirable. It's just the "natural" progression of a 5 step ladder and that seems to be reason enough.