Tools: Powerful Software Factories And The Agentic Moment
We built a Software Factory: non-interactive development where specs + scenarios drive agents that write code, run harnesses, and converge without human review.
The narrative form is included below. If you'd prefer to work from first principles, I offer a few constraints & guidelines that, applied iteratively, will accelerate any team toward the same intuitions, convictions1, and ultimately a factory2 of your own. In kōan or mantra form:
On July 14th, 2025, Jay Taylor and Navan Chauhan joined me (Justin McCarthy, co-founder, CTO) in founding the StrongDM AI team.
The catalyst was a transition observed in late 2024: with the second revision of Claude 3.5 (October 2024), long-horizon agentic coding workflows began to compound correctness rather than error.
By December of 2024, the model's long-horizon coding performance was unmistakable via Cursor's YOLO mode.
Prior to this model improvement, iterative application of LLMs to coding tasks would accumulate errors of all imaginable varieties (misunderstandings, hallucinations, syntax, version DRY violations, library incompatibility, etc). The app or product would decay and ultimately "collapse": death by a thousand cuts, etc.
Together with YOLO mode, the updated model from Anthropic provided the first glimmer of what we now refer to internally as non-interactive development or grown software.
In the first hour of the first day of our AI team, we established a charter which set us on a path toward a series of findings (which we refer to as our "unlocks"). In retrospect, the most important line in the charter document was the following:
Initially it was just a hunch. An experiment. How far could we get, without writing any code by hand?
Not very far! At least: not very far, until we added tests. However, the agent, obsessed with the immediate task, soon began to take shortcuts: return true is a great way to pass narrowly written tests, but probably won't generalize to the software you want.
Source: HackerNews
