Comment by losvedir

I think the "software factory" terminology is very interesting, and I would imagine quite intentional.

It calls to mind the early days of the industrial revolution, when I believe the idea was that mass produced items were not better quality, just dramatically cheaper. So you still had the artisans that the rich people paid for but now poorer people had access to something they couldn't before.

Then, as technology progressed, factories started producing things that humans are incapable of. And part of this is because those factories were built on output of earlier factories.

It makes me wonder if this is where we're headed. Right now the code quality of agents isn't better than hand written code, and so arguably the products aren't either. But will there come a time when it surpasses what we can do? You can't handcraft a microchip, for example. But I guess the takeaway is maybe there's a time for both agentic lower quality but cheaper output and human software engineer higher quality output, at least for a time.