Why Software Factories Fail or: harness engineering is not enough Note I run a company ( HumanLayer ) building tools in the human/agent collaboration space, so what I'm gonna say below may be a tad biased. Perhaps in spite of that, I hope you find the subject helpful or at the very least that you find it as interesting as I do. -Dex i guess we doin loops now We're all racing to put AI coding into production. A lot has been said about loop engineering, and the prevailing wisdom is that we should probably write more loops. 1 StrongDM wrote about their lights-off software factory where no human reads code and no human writes code. The narrative goes something like this: You are the bottleneck. The models are good enough. Code is free. Just ship more stuff. Ryan Lopopolo of OpenAI wrote about this in February and gave a talk in April about OpenAI's software factory, Symphony. These people are all really dang smart and I have a ton of respect for them.…