Simon Willison on Lenny's Podcast: 'We've Passed the Inflection Point — Dark Factories Are Coming'

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Simon Willison declared on Lenny's Podcast that the November 2025 moment when AI coding agents became truly effective was a permanent inflection, not a trend. He laid out the 'dark factory' pattern — where nobody writes code, nobody reviews code, and AI does its own QA — referencing StrongDM's Software Factory as the first production example. Key quote from StrongDM's guiding principles: 'Code must not be written by humans' and 'Code must not be reviewed by humans.' Willison argues experienced engineers get dramatically better results because the bottleneck has shifted from writing to orchestrating and taste.