Building Attractor
Supply the following prompt to a modern coding agent
(Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode, Amp, Cursor, etc):
codeagent> Implement Attractor as described by
https://factory.strongdm.ai/
Canadian girlfriend coding is now a business model.
For those of us working on building factories, this is pretty obvious because once you immediately need shared context across agents / sessions and an improved ID + permissions system to keep track of who is doing what.
I've looked at their code for a few minutes in a few files, and while I don't know what they're trying to do well enough to say for sure anything is definitely a bug, I've already spotted several things that seem likely to be, and several others that I'd class as anti-patterns in rust. Don't get me wrong, as an experiment this is really cool, but I do not think they've succeeded in getting the "dark factory" concept to work where every other prominent attempt has fallen short.
I was about to say the same thing! Yet another blog post with heaps of navel gazing and zero to actually show for it.
The worst part is they got simonw to (perhaps unwittingly or social engineering) vouch and stealth market for them.
And $1000/day/engineer in token costs at current market rates? It's a bold strategy, Cotton.
But we all know what they're going for here. They want to make themselves look amazing to convince the boards of the Great Houses to acquire them. Because why else would investors invest in them and not in the Great Houses directly.
This one is worth paying attention to to. They're the most ambitious team I've see exploring the limits of what you can do with this stuff. It's eye-opening.
> If you haven’t spent at least $1,000 on tokens today per human engineer, your software factory has room for improvement
Seems to me like if this is true I'm screwed no matter if I want to "embrace" the "AI revolution" or not. No way my manager's going to approve me to blow $1000 a day on tokens, they budgeted $40,000 for our team to explore AI for the entire year.
Let alone from a personal perspective I'm screwed because I don't have $1000 a month in the budget to blow on tokens because of pesky things that also demand financial resources like a mortgage and food.
At this point it seems like damned if I do, damned if I don't. Feels bad man.
I wonder if this is just a byproduct of factories being very early and very inefficient. Yegge and Huntley both acknowledge that their experiments in autonomous factories are extremely expensive and wasteful!
I would expect cost to come down over time, using approaches pioneered in the field of manufacturing.
This is the part that feels right to me because agents are idiots.
I built a tool that writes (non shit) reports from unstructured data to be used internally by analysts at a trading firm.
It cost between $500 to $5000 per day per seat to run.
It could have cost a lot more but latency matters in market reports in a way it doesn't for software. I imagine they are burning $1000 per day per seat because they can't afford more.
They are idiots, but getting better. Ex: wrote an agent skill to do some read only stuff on a container filesystem. Stupid I know, it’s like a maintainer script that can make recommendations, whatever.
Another skill called skill-improver, which tries to reduce skill token usage by finding deterministic patterns in another skill that can be scripted, and writes and packages the script.
Putting them together, the container-maintenance thingy improves itself every iteration, validated with automatic testing. It works perfectly about 3/4 of the time, another half of the time it kinda works, and fails spectacularly the rest.
It’s only going to get better, and this fit within my Max plan usage while coding other stuff.
LLMs are idiots and they will never get better because they have quadratic attention and a limited context window.
If the tokens that need to attend to each other are on opposite ends of the code base the only way to do that is by reading in the whole code base and hoping for the best.
If you're very lucky you can chunk the code base in such a way that the chunks pairwise fit in your context window and you can extract the relevant tokens hierarchically.
If you're not. Well get reading monkey.
Agents, md files, etc. are bandaids to hide this fact. They work great until they don't.
My friend works at Shopify and they are 100% all in on AI coding. They let devs spend as much as they want on whatever tool they want. If someone ends up spending a lot of money, they ask them what is going well and please share with others. If you’re not spending they have a different talk with you.
As for me, we get Cursor seats at work, and at home I have a GPU, a cheap Chinese coding plan, and a dream.
> If someone ends up spending a lot of money, they ask them what is going well and please share with others. If you’re not spending they have a different talk with you.
Make a "systemctl start tokenspender.service" and share it with the team?
I read that as combined, up to this point in time. You have 20 engineers? If you haven't spent at least $20k up to this point, you've not explored or experienced enough of the ins and outs to know how best to optimize the use of these tools.
I didn't read that as you need to be spending $1k/day per engineer. That is an insane number.
EDIT: re-reading... it's ambiguous to me. But perhaps they mean per day, every day. This will only hasten the elimination of human developers, which I presume is the point.
Same. Feels like it goes against the entire “hacker” ethos that brought me here in the first place. That sentence made me actually feel physically sick on initial read as well. Everyday now feels like a day where I have exponentially less & less interest in tech. If all of this AI that’s burning the planet is so incredible, where are the real world tangible improvements? I look around right now and everything in tech, software, internet, etc. has never looked so similar to a dumpster fire of trash.
I think corporate incentives vs personal incentives are slightly different here. As a company trying to experiment in this moment, you should be betting on token cost not being the bottleneck. If the tooling proves valuable, $1k/day per engineer is actually pretty cheap.
At home on my personal setup, I haven't even had to move past the cheapest codex/claude code subscription because it fulfills my needs ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. You can also get a lot of mileage out of the higher tiers of these subscriptions before you need to start paying the APIs directly.
In big companies there is always waste, it's just not possible to be super efficient when you have tens of thousands of people. It's one thing in a steady state, low-competition business where you can refine and optimize processes so everyone knows exactly what their job is, but that is generally not the environment that software companies operate in. They need to be able innovate and stay competitive, never moreso than today.
The thing with AI is that it ranges from net-negative to easily brute forcing tedious things that we never have considered wasting human time on. We can't figure out where the leverage is unless all the subject matter experts in their various organizational niches really check their assumptions and get creative about experimenting and just trying different things that may never have crossed their mind before. Obviously over time best practices will emerge and get socialized, but with the rate that AI has been improving lately, it makes a lot of sense to just give employees carte blanche to explore. Soon enough there will be more scrutiny and optimization, but that doesn't really make sense without a better understanding of what is possible.
I do not really agree with the below, but the logic is probably:
1) Engineering investment at companies generally pays off in multiples of what is spent on engineering time. Say you pay 10 engineers $200k / year each and the features those 10 engineers build grow yearly revenue by $10M. That’s a 4x ROI and clearly a good deal. (Of course, this only applies up to some ceiling; not every company has enough TAM to grow as big as Amazon).
2) Giving engineers near-unlimited access to token usage means they can create even more features, in a way that still produces positive ROI per token. This is the part I disagree with most. It’s complicated. You cannot just ship infinite slop and make money. It glosses over massive complexity in how software is delivered and used.
3) Therefore (so the argument goes) you should not cap tokens and should encourage engineers to use as many as possible.
Like I said, I don’t agree with this argument. But the key thing here is step 1. Engineering time is an investment to grow revenue. If you really could get positive ROI per token in revenue growth, you should buy infinite tokens until you hit the ceiling of your business.
Of course, the real world does not work like this.
Right, I understand of course that AI usage and token costs are an investment (probably even a very good one!).
But my point is moreso that saying 1k a day is cheap is ridiculous. Even for a company that expects an ROI on that investment. There’s risks involved and as you said, diminishing returns on software output.
I find AI bros view of the economics of AI usage strange. It’s reasonable to me to say you think its a good investment, but to say it’s cheap is a whole different thing.
Oh sure. We agree on all you said. I wouldn’t call it cheap either. :)
The best you can say is “high cost but positive ROI investment.” Although I don’t think that’s true beyond a certain point either, certainly not outside special cases like small startups with a lot of funding trying to build a product quickly. You can’t just spew tokens about and expect revenue to increase.
That said, I do reserve some special scorn for companies that penny-pinch on AI tooling. Any CTO or CEO who thinks a $200/month Claude Max subscription (or equivalent) for each developer is too much money to spent really needs to rethink their whole model of software ROI and costs. You’re often paying your devs >$100k yr and you won’t pay $2k / yr to make them more productive? I understand there are budget and planning cycle constraints blah blah, but… really?!
It is tempting to be stealthy when you start seeing discontinuous capabilities go from totally random to somewhat predictable. But most of the key stuff is on GitHub.
The moats here are around mechanism design and values (to the extent they differ): the frontier labs are doomed in this world, the commons locked up behind paywalls gets hyper mirrored, value accrues in very different places, and it's not a nice orderly exponent from a sci-fi novel. It's nothing like what the talking heads at Davos say, Anthropic aren't in the top five groups I know in terms of being good at it, it'll get written off as fringe until one day it happens in like a day. So why be secretive?
You get on the ladder by throwing out Python and JSON and learning lean4, you tie property tests to lean theorems via FFI when you have to, you start building out rfl to pretty printers of proven AST properties.
And yeah, the droids run out ahead in little firecracker VMs reading from an effect/coeffect attestation graph and writing back to it. The result is saved, useful results are indexed. Human review is about big picture stuff, human coding is about airtight correctness (and fixing it when it breaks despite your "proof" that had a bug in the axioms).
Programming jobs are impacted but not as much as people think: droids do what David Graeber called bullshit jobs for the most part and then they're savants (not polymath geniuses) at a few things: reverse engineering and infosec they'll just run you over, they're fucking going in CIC.
Can you make an ethical declaration here, stating whether or not you are being compensated by them?
Their page looks to me like a lot of invented jargon and pure narrative. Every technique is just a renamed existing concept. Digital Twin Universe is mocks, Gene Transfusion is reading reference code, Semport is transpilation. The site has zero benchmarks, zero defect rates, zero cost comparisons, zero production outcomes. The only metric offered is "spend more money".
Anyone working honestly in this space knows 90% of agent projects are failing.
The main page of HN now has three to four posts daily with no substance, just Agentic AI marketing dressed as engineering insight.
With Google, Microsoft, and others spending $600 billion over the next year on AI, and panicking to get a return on that Capex....and with them now paying influencers over $600K [1] to manufacture AI enthusiasm to justify this infrastructure spend, I won't engage with any AI thought leadership that lacks a clear disclosure of financial interests and reproducible claims backed by actual data.
Show me a real production feature built entirely by agents with full traces, defect rates, and honest failure accounting. Or stop inventing vocabulary and posting vibes charts.
"If you haven't spent at least $1,000 on tokens today per human engineer, your software factory has room for improvement"
Apart from being a absolutely ridiculous metric, this is a bad approach, at least with current generation models. In my experience, the less you inspect what the model does, the more spaghetti-like the code will be. And the flying spaghetti monster eats tokens faster than you can blink! Or put more clearly: implementing a feature will cost you a lot more tokens in a messy code base than it does in a clean one. It's not (yet) enough to just tell the agent to refactor and make it clean, you have to give it hints on how to organise the code.
I'd go do far as to say that if you're burning a thousand dollars a day per engineer, you're getting very little bang for your tokens.
It's short-term vs long-term optimization. Short-term optimization is making the system effective right now. Long-term optimization is exploring ways to improve the system as a whole.
What has strongdm actually built? Are their users finding value from their supposed productivity gains?
If their focus is to only show their productivity/ai system but not having built anything meaningful with it, it feels like one of those scammy life coaches/productivity gurus that talk about how they got rich by selling their courses.
$100 says they're still doing leetcode interviews.
If everyone can do this, there won't be any advantage (or profit) to be had from it very soon. Why not buy your own hardware and run local models, I wonder.
I would spend those $100 on either API tokens or donate to a charity of your choice. My interview to join this team was whether I could build something of my choosing in under an hour with any coding agent of my choice.
No local model out there is as good as the SOTA right now.
Effectively everyone is building the same tools with zero quantitative benchmarks or evidence behind the why / ideas … this entire space is a nightmare to navigate because of this. Who cares without proper science, seriously? I look through this website and it looks like a preview for a course I’m supposed to buy … when someone builds something with these sorts of claims attached, I assume that there is going to be some “real graphs” (“these are the number of times this model deviated from the spec before we added error correction …”)
What we have instead are many people creating hierarchies of concepts, a vast “naming” of their own experiences, without rigorous quantitative evaluation.
I may be alone in this, but it drives me nuts.
Okay, so with that in mind, it amounts to heresay “these guys are doing something cool” — why not shut up or put up with either (a) an evaluation of the ideas in a rigorous, quantitative way or (b) apply the ideas to produce an “hard” artifact (analogous, e.g., to the Anthropic C compiler, the Cursor browser) with a reproducible pathway to generation.
The answer seems to be that (b) is impossible (as long as we’re on the teet of the frontier labs, which disallow the kind of access that would make (b) possible) and the answer for (a) is “we can’t wait we have to get our names out there first”
I’m disappointed to see these types of posts on HN. Where is the science?
Honestly I've not found a huge amount of value from the "science".
There are plenty of papers out there that look at LLM productivity and every one of them seems to have glaring methodology limitations and/or reports on models that are 12+ months out of date.
Have you seen any papers that really elevated your understanding of LLM productivity with real-world engineering teams?
> we transitioned from boolean definitions of success ("the test suite is green") to a probabilistic and empirical one. We use the term satisfaction to quantify this validation: of all the observed trajectories through all the scenarios, what fraction of them likely satisfy the user?
Oh, to have the luxury of redefining success and handwaving away hard learned lessons in the software industry.
I have been working on my own "Digital Twins Universe" because 3rd-party SaaS tools often block the tight feedback loops required for long-horizon agentic coding. Unlike Stripe, which offers a full-featured environment usable in both development and staging, most B2B SaaS companies lack adequate fidelity (e.g., missing webhooks in local dev) or even a basic staging environment.
Taking the time to point a coding agent towards the public (or even private) API of a B2B SaaS app to generate a working (partial) clone is effectively "unblocking" the agent. I wouldn't be surprised if a "DTU-hub" eventually gains traction for publishing and sharing these digital twins.
I would love to hear more about your learnings from building these digital twins. How do you handle API drift? Also, how do you handle statefulness within the twins? Do you test for divergence? For example, do you compare responses from the live third-party service against the Digital Twin to check for parity?
Having submitted this I would also suggest the website admin revisit their testing; its very slow on my phone. Obviously fails on aesthetics and accessibility as well. Submitted for the essay.
> Those of us building software factories must practice a deliberate naivete
This is a great way to put it, I've been saying "I wonder which sacred cows are going to need slaughtered" but for those that didn't grow up on a farm, maybe that metaphor isn't the best. I might steal yours.
This stuff is very interesting and I'm really interested to see how it goes for you, I'll eagerly read whatever you end up putting out about this. Good luck!
EDIT: oh also the re-implemented SaaS apps really recontextualizes some other stuff I’ve been doing too…
I’ve been building using a similar approach[1] and my intuition is that humans will be needed at some points in the factory line for specific tasks that require expertise/taste/quality. Have you found that the be the case? Where do you find that humans should be involved in the process of maximal leverage?
To name one probable area of involvement: how do you specify what needs to be built?
Your intuition/thinking definitely lines up with how we're thinking about this problem. If you have a good definition of done and a good validation harness, these agents can hill climb their way to a solution.
But you still need human taste/judgment to decide what you want to build (unless your solution is to just brute force the entire problem space).
For maximal leverage, you should follow the mantra "Why am I doing this?" If you use this enough times, you'll come across the bottleneck that can only be solved by you for now. As a human, your job is to set the higher-level requirements for what you're trying to build. Coming up with these requirements and then using agents to shape them up is acceptable, but human judgment is definitely where we have to answer what needs to be built. At the same time, I never want to be doing something the models are better at. Until we crack the proactiveness part, we'll be required to figure out what to do next.
Also, it looks like you and Danvers are working in the same space, and we love trading notes with other teams working in this area. We'd love to connect. You can either find my personal email or shoot me an email at my work email: navan.chauhan [at] strongdm.com
It’s part of the “lore” that gets passed down when you join the company.
Funnily enough, the marketing department even ran a campaign asking, “What does DM stand for?!”, and the answer was “Digital Metropolis,” because we did a design refresh.
I just linked the website because that’s what the actual company does, and we are just the “AI Lab”
So much of this resonated with me, and I realize I’ve arrived at a few of the techniques myself (and with my team) over the last several months.
THIS FRIGHTENS ME. Many of us sweng are either going be FIRE millionaires, or living under a bridge, in two years.
I’ve spent this week performing SemPort; found a ts app that does a needed thing, and was able to use a long chain of prompts to get it completely reimplemented in our stack, using Gene Transfer to ensure it uses some existing libraries and concrete techniques present in our existing apps.
Now not only do I have an idiomatic Python port, which I can drop right into our stack, but I have an extremely detailed features/requirements statement for the origin typescript app along with the prompts for generating it. I can use this to continuously track this other product as it improves. I also have the “instructions infrastructure” to direct an agent to align new code to our stack. Two reusable skills, a new product, and it took a week.
My post? Shiiiii if that’s how it comes across I may delete it. I haven’t logged into LI since our last corp reorg, it was a cesspool even then. Self promotion just ain’t my bag
I was just trying to share the same patterns from OPs documentation that I found valuable within the context of agentic development; seeing them take this so far is was scares me, because they are right that I could wire an agent to do this autonomously and probably get the same outcomes, scaled.
I was looking for some code, or a product they made, or anything really on their site.
The only github I could find is: https://github.com/strongdm/attractor
Canadian girlfriend coding is now a business model.Edit:
I did find some code. Commit history has been squashed unfortunately: https://github.com/strongdm/cxdb
There's a bunch more under the same org but it's years old.
They have a Products page where they list a database and an identity system in addition to attractors: https://factory.strongdm.ai/products
For those of us working on building factories, this is pretty obvious because once you immediately need shared context across agents / sessions and an improved ID + permissions system to keep track of who is doing what.
I don't know if that is crazy or a glimpse of the future (could be both).
PS: TIL about "Canadian girlfriend", thanks!
There's actual code in this repo: https://github.com/strongdm/cxdb
I've looked at their code for a few minutes in a few files, and while I don't know what they're trying to do well enough to say for sure anything is definitely a bug, I've already spotted several things that seem likely to be, and several others that I'd class as anti-patterns in rust. Don't get me wrong, as an experiment this is really cool, but I do not think they've succeeded in getting the "dark factory" concept to work where every other prominent attempt has fallen short.
Out of interest, what anti-patterns did you see?
(I'm continuing to try to learn Rust!)
I was about to say the same thing! Yet another blog post with heaps of navel gazing and zero to actually show for it.
The worst part is they got simonw to (perhaps unwittingly or social engineering) vouch and stealth market for them.
And $1000/day/engineer in token costs at current market rates? It's a bold strategy, Cotton.
But we all know what they're going for here. They want to make themselves look amazing to convince the boards of the Great Houses to acquire them. Because why else would investors invest in them and not in the Great Houses directly.
The "social engineering" is that I was invited to a demo back in October and thought it was really interesting.
(Two people who's opinions I respect said "yeah you really should accept that invitation" otherwise I probably wouldn't have gone.)
I've been looking forward to being able to write more details about what they're doing ever since.
I will look forward to that blog post then, hopefully it has more details than this one.
EDIT nvm just saw your other comment.
That's hilarious
This is the stealth team I hinted at in a comment on here last week about the "Dark Factory" pattern of AI-assisted software engineering: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46739117#46801848
I wrote a bunch more about that this morning: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/7/software-factory/
This one is worth paying attention to to. They're the most ambitious team I've see exploring the limits of what you can do with this stuff. It's eye-opening.
This right here is where I feel most concerned
> If you haven’t spent at least $1,000 on tokens today per human engineer, your software factory has room for improvement
Seems to me like if this is true I'm screwed no matter if I want to "embrace" the "AI revolution" or not. No way my manager's going to approve me to blow $1000 a day on tokens, they budgeted $40,000 for our team to explore AI for the entire year.
Let alone from a personal perspective I'm screwed because I don't have $1000 a month in the budget to blow on tokens because of pesky things that also demand financial resources like a mortgage and food.
At this point it seems like damned if I do, damned if I don't. Feels bad man.
Yeah, that's one part of this that didn't sit right with me.
I don't think you need to spend anything like that amount of money to get the majority of the value they're describing here.
Edit: added a new section to my blog post about this: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/7/software-factory/#wait-...
I wonder if this is just a byproduct of factories being very early and very inefficient. Yegge and Huntley both acknowledge that their experiments in autonomous factories are extremely expensive and wasteful!
I would expect cost to come down over time, using approaches pioneered in the field of manufacturing.
This is the part that feels right to me because agents are idiots.
I built a tool that writes (non shit) reports from unstructured data to be used internally by analysts at a trading firm.
It cost between $500 to $5000 per day per seat to run.
It could have cost a lot more but latency matters in market reports in a way it doesn't for software. I imagine they are burning $1000 per day per seat because they can't afford more.
They are idiots, but getting better. Ex: wrote an agent skill to do some read only stuff on a container filesystem. Stupid I know, it’s like a maintainer script that can make recommendations, whatever.
Another skill called skill-improver, which tries to reduce skill token usage by finding deterministic patterns in another skill that can be scripted, and writes and packages the script.
Putting them together, the container-maintenance thingy improves itself every iteration, validated with automatic testing. It works perfectly about 3/4 of the time, another half of the time it kinda works, and fails spectacularly the rest.
It’s only going to get better, and this fit within my Max plan usage while coding other stuff.
LLMs are idiots and they will never get better because they have quadratic attention and a limited context window.
If the tokens that need to attend to each other are on opposite ends of the code base the only way to do that is by reading in the whole code base and hoping for the best.
If you're very lucky you can chunk the code base in such a way that the chunks pairwise fit in your context window and you can extract the relevant tokens hierarchically.
If you're not. Well get reading monkey.
Agents, md files, etc. are bandaids to hide this fact. They work great until they don't.
> No way my manager's going to approve me to blow $1000 a day on tokens, they budgeted $40,000 for our team to explore AI for the entire year.
To be fair, I’ll bet many embracing concerning advice like that have never worked for the same company for a full year.
My friend works at Shopify and they are 100% all in on AI coding. They let devs spend as much as they want on whatever tool they want. If someone ends up spending a lot of money, they ask them what is going well and please share with others. If you’re not spending they have a different talk with you.
As for me, we get Cursor seats at work, and at home I have a GPU, a cheap Chinese coding plan, and a dream.
> I have a GPU, a cheap Chinese coding plan, and a dream
Right in the feels
> If someone ends up spending a lot of money, they ask them what is going well and please share with others. If you’re not spending they have a different talk with you.
Make a "systemctl start tokenspender.service" and share it with the team?
I get $200 a month, I do wish I could get $1000 and stop worrying about trying the latest AI tools.
May be the point is, that the one engineer replaces 10 engineers by using the dark factory which by definition doesn't need humans.
The great hope of CEOs everywhere.
I read that as combined, up to this point in time. You have 20 engineers? If you haven't spent at least $20k up to this point, you've not explored or experienced enough of the ins and outs to know how best to optimize the use of these tools.
I didn't read that as you need to be spending $1k/day per engineer. That is an insane number.
EDIT: re-reading... it's ambiguous to me. But perhaps they mean per day, every day. This will only hasten the elimination of human developers, which I presume is the point.
Same. Feels like it goes against the entire “hacker” ethos that brought me here in the first place. That sentence made me actually feel physically sick on initial read as well. Everyday now feels like a day where I have exponentially less & less interest in tech. If all of this AI that’s burning the planet is so incredible, where are the real world tangible improvements? I look around right now and everything in tech, software, internet, etc. has never looked so similar to a dumpster fire of trash.
I think corporate incentives vs personal incentives are slightly different here. As a company trying to experiment in this moment, you should be betting on token cost not being the bottleneck. If the tooling proves valuable, $1k/day per engineer is actually pretty cheap.
At home on my personal setup, I haven't even had to move past the cheapest codex/claude code subscription because it fulfills my needs ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. You can also get a lot of mileage out of the higher tiers of these subscriptions before you need to start paying the APIs directly.
How is 1k/day cheap? Even for a large company?
Takes like this are just baffling to me.
For one engineer that is ~260k a year.
In big companies there is always waste, it's just not possible to be super efficient when you have tens of thousands of people. It's one thing in a steady state, low-competition business where you can refine and optimize processes so everyone knows exactly what their job is, but that is generally not the environment that software companies operate in. They need to be able innovate and stay competitive, never moreso than today.
The thing with AI is that it ranges from net-negative to easily brute forcing tedious things that we never have considered wasting human time on. We can't figure out where the leverage is unless all the subject matter experts in their various organizational niches really check their assumptions and get creative about experimenting and just trying different things that may never have crossed their mind before. Obviously over time best practices will emerge and get socialized, but with the rate that AI has been improving lately, it makes a lot of sense to just give employees carte blanche to explore. Soon enough there will be more scrutiny and optimization, but that doesn't really make sense without a better understanding of what is possible.
I do not really agree with the below, but the logic is probably:
1) Engineering investment at companies generally pays off in multiples of what is spent on engineering time. Say you pay 10 engineers $200k / year each and the features those 10 engineers build grow yearly revenue by $10M. That’s a 4x ROI and clearly a good deal. (Of course, this only applies up to some ceiling; not every company has enough TAM to grow as big as Amazon).
2) Giving engineers near-unlimited access to token usage means they can create even more features, in a way that still produces positive ROI per token. This is the part I disagree with most. It’s complicated. You cannot just ship infinite slop and make money. It glosses over massive complexity in how software is delivered and used.
3) Therefore (so the argument goes) you should not cap tokens and should encourage engineers to use as many as possible.
Like I said, I don’t agree with this argument. But the key thing here is step 1. Engineering time is an investment to grow revenue. If you really could get positive ROI per token in revenue growth, you should buy infinite tokens until you hit the ceiling of your business.
Of course, the real world does not work like this.
Right, I understand of course that AI usage and token costs are an investment (probably even a very good one!).
But my point is moreso that saying 1k a day is cheap is ridiculous. Even for a company that expects an ROI on that investment. There’s risks involved and as you said, diminishing returns on software output.
I find AI bros view of the economics of AI usage strange. It’s reasonable to me to say you think its a good investment, but to say it’s cheap is a whole different thing.
Oh sure. We agree on all you said. I wouldn’t call it cheap either. :)
The best you can say is “high cost but positive ROI investment.” Although I don’t think that’s true beyond a certain point either, certainly not outside special cases like small startups with a lot of funding trying to build a product quickly. You can’t just spew tokens about and expect revenue to increase.
That said, I do reserve some special scorn for companies that penny-pinch on AI tooling. Any CTO or CEO who thinks a $200/month Claude Max subscription (or equivalent) for each developer is too much money to spent really needs to rethink their whole model of software ROI and costs. You’re often paying your devs >$100k yr and you won’t pay $2k / yr to make them more productive? I understand there are budget and planning cycle constraints blah blah, but… really?!
Until there's something verifiable it's just talk. Talk was cheap. Now talk has become an order of magnitude cheaper since ChatGPT.
It is tempting to be stealthy when you start seeing discontinuous capabilities go from totally random to somewhat predictable. But most of the key stuff is on GitHub.
The moats here are around mechanism design and values (to the extent they differ): the frontier labs are doomed in this world, the commons locked up behind paywalls gets hyper mirrored, value accrues in very different places, and it's not a nice orderly exponent from a sci-fi novel. It's nothing like what the talking heads at Davos say, Anthropic aren't in the top five groups I know in terms of being good at it, it'll get written off as fringe until one day it happens in like a day. So why be secretive?
You get on the ladder by throwing out Python and JSON and learning lean4, you tie property tests to lean theorems via FFI when you have to, you start building out rfl to pretty printers of proven AST properties.
And yeah, the droids run out ahead in little firecracker VMs reading from an effect/coeffect attestation graph and writing back to it. The result is saved, useful results are indexed. Human review is about big picture stuff, human coding is about airtight correctness (and fixing it when it breaks despite your "proof" that had a bug in the axioms).
Programming jobs are impacted but not as much as people think: droids do what David Graeber called bullshit jobs for the most part and then they're savants (not polymath geniuses) at a few things: reverse engineering and infosec they'll just run you over, they're fucking going in CIC.
This is about formal methods just as much as AI.
Can you make an ethical declaration here, stating whether or not you are being compensated by them?
Their page looks to me like a lot of invented jargon and pure narrative. Every technique is just a renamed existing concept. Digital Twin Universe is mocks, Gene Transfusion is reading reference code, Semport is transpilation. The site has zero benchmarks, zero defect rates, zero cost comparisons, zero production outcomes. The only metric offered is "spend more money".
Anyone working honestly in this space knows 90% of agent projects are failing.
The main page of HN now has three to four posts daily with no substance, just Agentic AI marketing dressed as engineering insight.
With Google, Microsoft, and others spending $600 billion over the next year on AI, and panicking to get a return on that Capex....and with them now paying influencers over $600K [1] to manufacture AI enthusiasm to justify this infrastructure spend, I won't engage with any AI thought leadership that lacks a clear disclosure of financial interests and reproducible claims backed by actual data.
Show me a real production feature built entirely by agents with full traces, defect rates, and honest failure accounting. Or stop inventing vocabulary and posting vibes charts.
[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46925821
Simon does have a disclosure on his site about not being compensated for anything: https://simonwillison.net/about/#disclosures
Thank you. That link discloses there was at least one instance where OpenAI paid for his time.
I will reformulate my question to ask instead if the page is still 100% correct or needs an update?
It's current. I last modified it in October: https://github.com/simonw/simonwillisonblog/commits/main/tem...
"If you haven't spent at least $1,000 on tokens today per human engineer, your software factory has room for improvement"
Apart from being a absolutely ridiculous metric, this is a bad approach, at least with current generation models. In my experience, the less you inspect what the model does, the more spaghetti-like the code will be. And the flying spaghetti monster eats tokens faster than you can blink! Or put more clearly: implementing a feature will cost you a lot more tokens in a messy code base than it does in a clean one. It's not (yet) enough to just tell the agent to refactor and make it clean, you have to give it hints on how to organise the code.
I'd go do far as to say that if you're burning a thousand dollars a day per engineer, you're getting very little bang for your tokens.
And your engineers probably look like this: https://share.google/H5BFJ6guF4UhvXMQ7
It's short-term vs long-term optimization. Short-term optimization is making the system effective right now. Long-term optimization is exploring ways to improve the system as a whole.
What has strongdm actually built? Are their users finding value from their supposed productivity gains?
If their focus is to only show their productivity/ai system but not having built anything meaningful with it, it feels like one of those scammy life coaches/productivity gurus that talk about how they got rich by selling their courses.
$100 says they're still doing leetcode interviews.
If everyone can do this, there won't be any advantage (or profit) to be had from it very soon. Why not buy your own hardware and run local models, I wonder.
I would spend those $100 on either API tokens or donate to a charity of your choice. My interview to join this team was whether I could build something of my choosing in under an hour with any coding agent of my choice.
No local model out there is as good as the SOTA right now.
> My interview to join this team was whether I could build something of my choosing in under an hour with any coding agent of my choice.
You should have led with that. I think that's actually more impressive; anyone can spend tokens.
Effectively everyone is building the same tools with zero quantitative benchmarks or evidence behind the why / ideas … this entire space is a nightmare to navigate because of this. Who cares without proper science, seriously? I look through this website and it looks like a preview for a course I’m supposed to buy … when someone builds something with these sorts of claims attached, I assume that there is going to be some “real graphs” (“these are the number of times this model deviated from the spec before we added error correction …”)
What we have instead are many people creating hierarchies of concepts, a vast “naming” of their own experiences, without rigorous quantitative evaluation.
I may be alone in this, but it drives me nuts.
Okay, so with that in mind, it amounts to heresay “these guys are doing something cool” — why not shut up or put up with either (a) an evaluation of the ideas in a rigorous, quantitative way or (b) apply the ideas to produce an “hard” artifact (analogous, e.g., to the Anthropic C compiler, the Cursor browser) with a reproducible pathway to generation.
The answer seems to be that (b) is impossible (as long as we’re on the teet of the frontier labs, which disallow the kind of access that would make (b) possible) and the answer for (a) is “we can’t wait we have to get our names out there first”
I’m disappointed to see these types of posts on HN. Where is the science?
Honestly I've not found a huge amount of value from the "science".
There are plenty of papers out there that look at LLM productivity and every one of them seems to have glaring methodology limitations and/or reports on models that are 12+ months out of date.
Have you seen any papers that really elevated your understanding of LLM productivity with real-world engineering teams?
> we transitioned from boolean definitions of success ("the test suite is green") to a probabilistic and empirical one. We use the term satisfaction to quantify this validation: of all the observed trajectories through all the scenarios, what fraction of them likely satisfy the user?
Oh, to have the luxury of redefining success and handwaving away hard learned lessons in the software industry.
Yep, you definitely want to be in the business of selling shovels for the gold rush.
I have been working on my own "Digital Twins Universe" because 3rd-party SaaS tools often block the tight feedback loops required for long-horizon agentic coding. Unlike Stripe, which offers a full-featured environment usable in both development and staging, most B2B SaaS companies lack adequate fidelity (e.g., missing webhooks in local dev) or even a basic staging environment.
Taking the time to point a coding agent towards the public (or even private) API of a B2B SaaS app to generate a working (partial) clone is effectively "unblocking" the agent. I wouldn't be surprised if a "DTU-hub" eventually gains traction for publishing and sharing these digital twins.
I would love to hear more about your learnings from building these digital twins. How do you handle API drift? Also, how do you handle statefulness within the twins? Do you test for divergence? For example, do you compare responses from the live third-party service against the Digital Twin to check for parity?
> A problem repeatedly occurred on "https://factory.strongdm.ai/".
Having submitted this I would also suggest the website admin revisit their testing; its very slow on my phone. Obviously fails on aesthetics and accessibility as well. Submitted for the essay.
Haha yeah if I scroll on my iPhone 15 Pro it literally doesn’t load until I stop.
Sounds like you're experiencing an "agentic moment".
I get the following on safari on iOs: A problem repeatedly occurred on (url)
On iOS Safari it loads and works decent for me, but w/ iOS Firefox and Firefox Focus doesn't even load.
Lets hope the agents in their factory can fix it asap...
(I’m one of the people on this team). I joined fresh out of college, and it’s been a wild ride.
I’m happy to answer any questions!
More of a comment than a question:
> Those of us building software factories must practice a deliberate naivete
This is a great way to put it, I've been saying "I wonder which sacred cows are going to need slaughtered" but for those that didn't grow up on a farm, maybe that metaphor isn't the best. I might steal yours.
This stuff is very interesting and I'm really interested to see how it goes for you, I'll eagerly read whatever you end up putting out about this. Good luck!
EDIT: oh also the re-implemented SaaS apps really recontextualizes some other stuff I’ve been doing too…
> "I wonder which sacred cows are going to need slaughtered"
Or a vegan or Hindu. Which ethics are you willing to throw away to run the software factory?
I eat hamburgers while aware of the moral issues.
I’ve been building using a similar approach[1] and my intuition is that humans will be needed at some points in the factory line for specific tasks that require expertise/taste/quality. Have you found that the be the case? Where do you find that humans should be involved in the process of maximal leverage?
To name one probable area of involvement: how do you specify what needs to be built?
[1] https://sociotechnica.org/notebook/software-factory/
You're absolutely right
Your intuition/thinking definitely lines up with how we're thinking about this problem. If you have a good definition of done and a good validation harness, these agents can hill climb their way to a solution.
But you still need human taste/judgment to decide what you want to build (unless your solution is to just brute force the entire problem space).
For maximal leverage, you should follow the mantra "Why am I doing this?" If you use this enough times, you'll come across the bottleneck that can only be solved by you for now. As a human, your job is to set the higher-level requirements for what you're trying to build. Coming up with these requirements and then using agents to shape them up is acceptable, but human judgment is definitely where we have to answer what needs to be built. At the same time, I never want to be doing something the models are better at. Until we crack the proactiveness part, we'll be required to figure out what to do next.
Also, it looks like you and Danvers are working in the same space, and we love trading notes with other teams working in this area. We'd love to connect. You can either find my personal email or shoot me an email at my work email: navan.chauhan [at] strongdm.com
I know you're not supposed to look at the code, but do you have things in place to measure and improve code quality anyway?
Not just code review agents, but things like "find duplicated code and refactor it"?
A few overnight “attractor” workflows serve distinct purposes:
* DRYing/Refactoring if needed
* Documentation compaction
* Security reviews
So, what does DM stand for?
Domain Model (https://strongdm.com)
Thanks. I’m unable to find the term “domain model” on the website.
It’s part of the “lore” that gets passed down when you join the company.
Funnily enough, the marketing department even ran a campaign asking, “What does DM stand for?!”, and the answer was “Digital Metropolis,” because we did a design refresh.
I just linked the website because that’s what the actual company does, and we are just the “AI Lab”
Doomy marketing?
Gas Town, but make it Enterprise.
So much of this resonated with me, and I realize I’ve arrived at a few of the techniques myself (and with my team) over the last several months.
THIS FRIGHTENS ME. Many of us sweng are either going be FIRE millionaires, or living under a bridge, in two years.
I’ve spent this week performing SemPort; found a ts app that does a needed thing, and was able to use a long chain of prompts to get it completely reimplemented in our stack, using Gene Transfer to ensure it uses some existing libraries and concrete techniques present in our existing apps.
Now not only do I have an idiomatic Python port, which I can drop right into our stack, but I have an extremely detailed features/requirements statement for the origin typescript app along with the prompts for generating it. I can use this to continuously track this other product as it improves. I also have the “instructions infrastructure” to direct an agent to align new code to our stack. Two reusable skills, a new product, and it took a week.
Please let’s not call ourselves “swengs”
Is it really that hard to write “developer” or “engineer”?
Sorry if rude but truly feel like I am missing the joke. This is just LinkedIn copypasta or something right?
My post? Shiiiii if that’s how it comes across I may delete it. I haven’t logged into LI since our last corp reorg, it was a cesspool even then. Self promotion just ain’t my bag
I was just trying to share the same patterns from OPs documentation that I found valuable within the context of agentic development; seeing them take this so far is was scares me, because they are right that I could wire an agent to do this autonomously and probably get the same outcomes, scaled.
Relevant blog post from simonw: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/7/software-factory/