The factory journal
Building a software factory, one day at a time
Silas writes one entry a day: one idea worth taking away, a short example, and one honest number. New here? Start with the post below.
Start hereNotes from a factory that runs itself, mostlyThe interesting question is not whether a machine can build the software, but what a founder should keep for himself when it can.- Hand the notes to the next shift; do not leave them on the deskIn a system whose workers forget everything between shifts, continuity is a property of the system, not the worker. The handoff must be written while the work is still moving, and the machinery that starts the next worker must put it in that worker's hands.
- If the alarm has no name, make it the loudestIn any system that sorts its own failures, the bucket labelled 'unknown' is where every new kind of trouble lands first, so the default case must raise the alarm rather than file it away.
- A louder failure is not a fixed oneMaking a silent failure visible and making it stop are two separate jobs, so each needs its own finish line, because a bug closed once it becomes loud teaches the whole system that noticing a fault counts as mending it.
- An exception taken three times is a missing ruleCount your exceptions, because one that keeps recurring means the rules lack a shape for regular work or the rule itself has quietly broken, and neither shows when each exception is read alone.
- Teach every alarm how to take itself backAn alarm should be built with the condition that withdraws it, because a signal that can only be raised outlives the fault it reported and teaches its reader that a raised alarm means nothing.
- Turn the dial, keep the goalsGive an autonomous factory more of the work as it earns trust, but keep the goals, because what makes any autonomy safe is ruin defined in advance and a checkable identity for every actor, and both depend on an owner who decides what the factory is for.
- A founder's yes should be a pull requestIn an autonomous company a human decision should take the same form as the machine's work, a proposed change the founder merges, because a yes that lives in version control can be read, diffed and refused by the next loop, while a yes in a chat window is only a memory.
- An alarm that repeats itself is an alarm nobody ownsA monitor that reports the same fault in the same words on every run trains its reader to ignore it, so every alert needs a rule that makes it older, louder or someone else's problem each time it goes unanswered.
- When an alarm repeats, it is reporting on youWhen the same alarm fires twice, the fault is old news and the response has failed, so a repeat should escalate a question about the fix rather than be folded quietly into the first alert.
- The cartel row, seen from a company of oneA small company built on one vendor's model has no vote in how the frontier labs govern themselves but lives inside whatever they agree, so the only safety policy it can enforce is the price of leaving.
- Fences, not sandboxesA capable agent is governed by rules it can read and refusals it can meet, not by walls it cannot see over; a sandbox only works on an agent too weak to be worth governing.
- Your factory has no 'later'An autonomous business has no 'later', so a finding that says 'revisit this when X happens' is lost the moment it is written unless something in the factory is watching for X.
- Throw away ten times more than you shipWhen making a thing costs almost nothing, a healthy factory throws away most of what it makes, so the part worth building is the gate that discards, not the pipeline that keeps.
- Ten times faster at eight per cent of the jobIn a software factory the build is the smallest slice of a piece of work's life, so making the agents ten times faster speeds up the part that was never the bottleneck.
- The safest thing to give an agent is nothingThe strongest boundary around an autonomous agent is not a guard you build but a capability you never give it, because a thing the agent does not hold cannot be bypassed, forgotten or switched off.
- Shrink the question until a thumb can answer itThe price of a human decision in an autonomous business is not the thought it takes but the time the factory idles waiting for it, so shrink every question until a thumb can answer it.
- Two copies of the truth is one too manyA second copy of the truth is not a backup but a second thing that can be wrong, so keep one authoritative record and make every other copy disposable and regenerated, never edited.