Infinite plausible PRs w/ Nate Berkopec

Back in February, Nate said that coding workflows built around adding more human-in-the-loop steps were a dead end, and that the end state is the "dark factory," where humans aren't allowed on the floor. Six months later, Matt asks him where he stands now. They cover why agents that produce endless plausible PRs haven't made anyone much faster, and why the real bottleneck is deciding what can actually be merged. They also talk about why software never learned to measure "quality" the way manufacturing does, why everyone's factory will probably be custom-built, and why feature development is the last thing you should automate. Along the way: Toyota fenders, bourbon tasters and a Dependabot setup you could build this afternoon. **Mentioned in this episode** - METR: AI's effect on experienced open-source developers: This is "the METR study nobody likes to cite." Experienced maintainers thought AI tools made them about 20% faster, but they were actually 19% slower. Compare it with the time-horizons graph that everyone does cite. - Tobi Lütke's Liquid PR #2056: An overnight autoresearch loop found parse and render times 53% faster, with 61% fewer allocations. The tests pass, but the PR is still open, because Liquid runs all of Shopify and has no formal spec. Background: Shopify's autoresearch write-up. - Hacker Typer: Nate's name for running six agent windows at once. It feels productive and hits every "chimp reward pathway," but that doesn't mean anything is getting done. - Claude Code Review: Anthropic's multi-agent PR reviewer, which costs about $15–25 per review. It's an example of AI now beating humans at catching bugs, and of how token costs add up once agents are opening their own PRs. - Cursor Automations: This is what Matt's team built their "gateway drug" factory on. When Dependabot opens a PR, an agent reads every changelog, checks the codebase for affected code, and then either merges the PR or flags a human. - Intercom: AI is approving our pull requests: This is where Nate got the counter-metric of tracking how many auto-merges get reverted. It keeps "merge rate" honest. - Why Ramp built its own background agent: Ramp and Intercom are both B2B SaaS companies, but they built very different factories. That's Nate's case for why every factory will be custom-built. - whenwords: Drew Breunig's "software library with no code." It's just a spec and tests, and an LLM builds it in any language. Nate calls it the 3D printing of software factories: impressive but narrow. - The Cockburn Scale: Alistair Cockburn's grid of team size against criticality, from "loss of comfort" up to "loss of life." Not every app needs the same factory, because HIPAA and rocket software aren't a CRUD app. - The Mythical Man-Month: Brooks's law says adding people slows a project down because of communication overhead. Nate argues it doesn't apply to agents, and that's why factories can scale when teams of people can't. Thank you to this season’s sponsor Laravel Cloud. Laravel Cloud is expanding beyond PHP to host your Rails, Node, or Django apps. For early access to the best place to host your app, email haley@laravel.com and mention YAGNI