> Agents are opening pull requests, reviewing each other's work, and closing them without a human ever touching the keyboard, with a continuously live log monitoring loop to rapidly fix issues.
I know gas town made a splash here a while back and some colleagues promote software factories, but I haven’t seen much real output..have any of you?
I prefer the guided development approach where it’s a pretty detailed dialog with the LLM. The results are good but it’s hardly hands off.
If I squint I can almost see this fully automated development life cycle, so why aren’t there real life examples out there?
I think the reason we're not seeing many examples yet is that the full loop doesn't work completely autonomously yet. There's still a human in the loop at some critical points - specifically testing against a spec (runtime testing if say working on web or mobile app before shipping to users). LLMs can do compile time testing and validation, unit tests, and can write your end to end tests, but if you're shipping software to users, there's still a human somewhere involved. This isn't even mentioning marketing and actually getting your software into the hands of users - which while it can be automated, a lot of marketing with AI is still sloppy.
No idea how automated it is but it's clearly accelerated since last Dec.
https://code.claude.com/docs/en/changelog
How do you know that there aren't? If you had a "robot software factory" that worked, and you were certain it was a source of not just lifechanging or generational but potentially centenary wealth - well.
There was a time in my life when I too would give such a thing away free, on the idea that those who might do some good with it may make up for the ones who will certainly turn it to great evil. After 30 years' exposure, some consensual, to Bay Area/Silicon Valley "culture," I am no longer so sweetly naïve.