What's this about?
On Sequoia's Training Data, Factory founder Matan Grinberg recounts starting to build fully autonomous coding agents in April 2023 — two years before enterprises were ready ("indistinguishable from being wrong") — and lays out the path toward a "dark factory" where software largely builds itself.
What exactly is a "dark factory"?
A term from manufacturing: a plant so automated it can run with the lights off, no humans on the floor. Applied to software, it means development pipelines where agents write, test, and ship code end-to-end with minimal human touch. Grinberg's bet is that coding is heading there.
Why does it matter?
It's a founder's-eye view of being right too early and the timing problem in AI startups — plus a concrete vision of autonomous software development that this week's Cursor-rebuilds-SQLite demo makes feel closer.