| So the central claim is this: > The factory of the future isn’t a coding agent, an IDE plugin, or a model API. It’s a full-stack service that accepts a spec from a brand and delivers running software continuously. That means model orchestration, code creation, hosting, implementation, testing, deployment, monitoring, maintenance, evolution. End to end. > Nobody has built this yet. But the pieces are falling into place fast. A factory isn’t a demo you vibe code in a weekend. It’s harnesses and production ownership — deep, compounding infrastructure that becomes exponentially harder to compete with once it’s running. Definitely a direction that I'm sure people are working towards, but I think this underestimates how crucial human expertise is in building software. Basically, I don't think software will ever become as commoditized as sneakers are. At a complex level of requirements (which will increasingly be the case with future software), software engineering becomes about architecture and constraint satisfaction where finding a really-out-of-the-box idea which you build into the software at the ground up that makes everything else possible becomes disproportionately important. I think people with a combination of technical & market expertise directly working on the software with full context of the project will continue to beat "brands" outsourcing software entirely to "factories". (That said, 100% automated "factories" will probably be relevant in automatically fast-following competitors or rapidly catching up to existing moats. This could make swathes of software un-monetizable, sort of like drug development without patents. You could spend a lot of effort finding a software design only for people to copy your "formula" and produce "generics" without any of your R&D effort.) |