Last week I hinted at a demo I had seen from a team implementing what Dan Shapiro called the Dark Factory level of AI adoption, where no human even looks at the code the coding agents are producing. That team was part of StrongDM, and they’ve just shared the first public description of how they are working in Software Factories and the Agentic Moment:
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I think the most interesting of these, without a doubt, is "Code must not be reviewed by humans". How could that possibly be a sensible strategy when we all know how prone LLMs are to making inhuman mistakes?
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Their new team started with the rule “no hand-coded software”—radical for July 2025, but something I’m seeing significant numbers of experienced developers start to adopt as of January 2026.
They quickly ran into the obvious problem: if you’re not writing anything by hand, how do you ensure that the code actually works? Having the agents write tests only helps if they don’t cheat and
assert true.
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I glossed over this detail in my first published version of this post, but it deserves some serious attention.
If these patterns really do add $20,000/month per engineer to your budget they’re far less interesting to me. At that point this becomes more of a business model exercise: can you create a profitable enough line of products that you can afford the enormous overhead of developing software in this way?
Building sustainable software businesses also looks very different when any competitor can potentially clone your newest features with a few hours of coding agent work.