There's a lot of talk about software factories right now. Frankly, most of it is bullshit. Beware “I do AI better than you" snake oil and think more from first principles. Strip most of them back, and you find a series of automations, and one of them happens to be a coding agent. (Which is also what CI/CD was. You stopped clicking around testing by hand, and a machine did it.) There’s a lot right with making your idea → ship loop continually faster and smarter, but I’m not sure that’s really a new idea. Nobody starts with a factory. A chocolate factory starts as one person and some beans in a kitchen, hand-making chocolate. Then they get a mixer. A bigger fridge. A conveyor belt. Then a packaging machine. Each addition builds scale, consistency and efficiency. A small business becomes a medium business, which becomes a factory. What changes along the way? Where the person stands. What the person does and the technology they can access. First, they do every step. They buy a machine or two. Then they do some steps and watch the machines. Then they operate and connect the machines. Then they redesign the factory itself. Software is the same loop. Ideas are dreamed up, feedback and operational bugs come in, someone turns them into a list of work items, someone builds it, someone reviews it, someone builds it, someone deploys it, it ships, something breaks, someone notices, someone files the bug. Rinse. Repeat. You've run that for years with a person at every station. To improve the factory you already have, upgrade one station today. Add automations and AI agents to code or review. Observe, learn. Then do the next one. Thoughtful, ambitious, patient scale. Are there roles for humans in that factory? Abso-bloody-lutely. Initiating ideas, observing the operation, reviewing at discrete checkpoints or severities, co-designing both the flowed work and the factory itself, owning exceptions and resolving conflicts, adding context. (Just look at one of our latest Loom action plans demo👇🏻 for an example of human-AI collaboration) I believe this human judgement and intuition only get more important as factory throughput scales. In short - don’t believe in the mythical agent month. You already have a software factory. AI just allows you to make more steps repeatable, more flexible - and that lets you move where you stand.