Lights out
30
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Search complete. 30 mentions across 7 episodes found for "Lights out".
Oct 22, 2026
Ray MyersGUEST
because I feel this is a non-solution to a non-problem that is being given so much credence for very dubious reasons, and in general, this will be harmful.
Ray MyersGUEST
That's my position on Dark Factory.
Ankit JainHOST
Hello, folks, and welcome to Hangar DX.
Ankit JainHOST
This is a podcast about developer experience and how engineering teams solve productivity challenges at scale.
Ray MyersGUEST
It's an idea that has gained a lot of popularity over the last year.
Ray MyersGUEST
And it is the idea that as we use coding agents in software development, which we do increasingly, that The end state is to use only them and use them as kind of the only vehicle by which we edit the code and ultimately turn the lights off.
Ray MyersGUEST
It becomes a dark factory named after lights out manufacturing, which is a physical thing kind of.
Ray MyersGUEST
And we don't even read the code, right? We interact only with agents and maybe our spec files.
A.W. SchultzHOST
Well, I was going to ask, because before we got on the show, you were talking about you've done a lot of travel recently, and one of them was into China.
A.W. SchultzHOST
And I was reading an article, actually, I wrote a blog about dark factories and how China perceives that they're kind of leading the way on something like that.
A.W. SchultzHOST
And I just, with No Magic and the kind of advancements that you guys have been incorporating, Do you see that? Is that one true? And two, is it or how far away is that? You know, you literally could be self-sufficient robots with no human interaction.
Brandon CoatsGUEST
Yeah.
TC GillHOST
What would you wish for from the tech genie for your industry, for your leadership, for your team?
Csaba TamasGUEST
What is the next level in, in terms of evolution is to build a so-called dark factory.
Csaba TamasGUEST
Many claim that they did it.
Csaba TamasGUEST
Uh, I don't know if you are familiar with the term.
Csaba TamasGUEST
So these dark factories are essentially the, the term is, is, uh, imported from those completely automated factories where there are no humans, therefore you don't need to have lights.
Csaba TamasGUEST
So only, uh, the supervisor who comes in once in a week turns on the lights, and that's the way they're dark, because the robots can work very well in, in the dark as well.
Csaba TamasGUEST
So in the same way, we are now on the mission to build this dark factory for our features.
Csaba TamasGUEST
And as I told you before, this is not just about building the, the software itself, because that problem is largely solved as, as of today, I would say.
speaker_0HOST
Stripe is often given as an example of this one.
speaker_0HOST
The second is Dark Factory and the name comes from manufacturing plants that run with the lights off because nobody is on the floor.
speaker_0HOST
In a dark factory, nobody writes or reviews code at all.
speaker_0HOST
A company called StrongDM claims to have used exactly this method to build its products.
speaker_0HOST
A lot of the details aren't very clear, like whether they use it for production code or only for internal tools.
speaker_0HOST
but they have a rule on their factory page that says no human should write or review code and that alone is pretty remarkable dan chapiro the ceo of glowforge has laid out a scale of ai assisted coding running from basic autocomplete at the bottom and he puts the dark factory at the very top now what does this look like in practice for the rest of us Gergely Oroz described it in his talk at the LDX3 conference in New York.
speaker_0HOST
Gergely said that handwritten code has become increasingly rare at AI labs, big tech companies, and startups, and engineers routinely run 5 to 10 agent sessions in parallel.
speaker_0HOST
The casualty is the review queue.
Wes RothHOST
There are tons of entries so far.
Wes RothHOST
One of them is Dark Factory, an autonomous software factory.
Wes RothHOST
Here it is.
Wes RothHOST
You send an idea before bed, and wake up to a deployed URL.
Wes RothHOST
Dark Factory is a lights-out factory for software.
Wes RothHOST
The agent scopes, build, and ships real projects while you are away.
Wes RothHOST
So we're literally beginning to see these autonomous businesses emerge right now.
1 HR LATER
Wes RothHOST
One of the tabs is the Hermes Accelerated Business Hackathon, where people have lots of submissions.
Victor RenteaGUEST
Beautiful.
Victor RenteaGUEST
That's what StrongDM did, the Dark Factory.
Victor RenteaGUEST
[sighs] Yeah.
Daniel CiocîrlanHOST
How do you learn personally? I mean, how do you develop? What kind of things do you read? Do you read books? Do you do lots of experiments? How do you grow on your own?
Sam NewmanGUEST
I'm gonna build my whole system of software factories.
Sam NewmanGUEST
Let's wind back a little bit and think about this concept of software factories really cribbing off the idea of what we call dark factories in the physical world.
Benedikt StemmildtHOST
Mm-hmm.
Benedikt StemmildtHOST
Mm-hmm.
Sam NewmanGUEST
They've defined how it's supposed to operate.
Sam NewmanGUEST
They have the ability to monitor it.
Sam NewmanGUEST
But by and large, they don't have to get involved because it just works, and things go in, things come out, and they're often called dark factories because the lights aren't on.
Sam NewmanGUEST
It's quite fun trying to search for pictures of dark factories online, because they're all AI, because the real dark factories are dark.