Scaling AI Adoption in Engineering

Chapter 5. A Glimpse Into Our Agentic Future

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In the manufacturing world, a “dark factory” has a production line that requires so little human intervention, it doesn’t need to have the lights on. No humans are required for supervision, and the machines can operate perfectly well in the dark.

In early 2026, StrongDM (along with the independent developer and writer Simon Willison and Glowforge CEO Dan Shapiro) popularized the concept of a dark factory for software engineering: an automated pipeline that can specify, decompose, code, test, and deploy production-quality code with little to no human intervention.

The software dark factory is neither an unattainable dream nor a trivial undertaking. If you just spin up a pipeline with naive agents and give it permission to deploy to production, you’re probably not going to like what happens. That said, engineers’ role is shifting away from artisanal code crafting and toward maintaining and refining agentic software factories (for DevEx and platform teams) ...