Isn’t this the same as just telling it the goal directly but with more steps?

Why would they use Notion in a system like this?

Seems like setting yourself up to have a massive pile of janky cruft.

I find it a bit suspicious that they don't talk about the amount of human intervention required (apart from writing the RFC, which itself can be done by the agent).

I think this can work if you've set up your codebase with proper AGENTS.md with all the guarantees and low level design you expect. I think some human intervention is required here so that you keep the codebase maintainable - you as the human know the domain and future plan well so your addition is valuable.

I also think its necessary to have some garbage collection - scheduled jobs that look at the codebase and think of ways to tighten it and come up with better design.

Lastly, even if one doesn't take away the full factory, I still think that deployments should be fully automated. In the companies I have seen, deployments are still a cognitive burden - one must look at 100 different dashboards and test in staging, look at logs and so on. This is something the agent can do very well and is best automated. Very few orgs have done this!

I don't believe the "software factory pattern" can even be established as a pattern. I wonder if it's considered normal these days to call a Silicon Valley management style a "pattern."

Fundamentally, a pattern is a reusable solution to a recurring problem. But what the author is describing here is simply an operational loop and a management strategy.

I think current agent methodologies are practically indistinguishable from human developer management theories. Isn't this just a feedback process? I would consider this an agentic workflow.

Also, people casually use the metaphor of a "factory" when churning things out, but a factory fundamentally operates on "orders"—it has a specific objective and a target production volume. The entire approach of just trying to dynamically respond to everything under this label feels somewhat contrived.

Furthermore, I always have this underlying question: why are we building software factories in the first place? Where are we manufacturing the people who will actually buy all this?

I've heard stories of people finding success by running "app factories" in the early 2010s when apps were scarce. But in the agent era, I believe we are already drowning in AI slop. We have to remember that back then, producer friction was high, and simply submitting an app was a difficult hurdle.

Now, AI handles most of the basics by default. Things that were once highly praised are now just the baseline. To create something actually worth selling today, you have to break the existing grammar entirely, build much more complex architectures, and offer deeper features. Given this new standard, I seriously question whether mass production is the right answer.

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