I’m pleased to announce a Commoncog members-only Q&A on Software Dark Factories with Jay Taylor and Navan Chauhan. This Q&A will be facilitated by James Cham from Bloomberg Beta.
A ‘Software Dark Factory’ is a software development model where no human writes code. Hell, no human even reads the code generated. This may sound a little crazy — and depending on your frame, I suppose it is.
Here at Commoncog, we’ve been talking about possible changes to the practice of software engineering now that AI coding agents are a thing. In How to Improve at Sensemaking AI? (the third part of the Sensemaking Series) I wrote that if Software Dark Factories are possible, software development as we know it may be changed forever. I also said that we don’t know what’s possible here, and that if this matters to your outcomes, you might need to sensemake by looking at field reports from the frontier.
Jay and Navan are the cofounders of Dark Factory Inc. and were AI researchers at StrongDM. StrongDM was one of the first teams executing a software dark factory style development model. Simon Willison wrote about it here, on Feb 7th 2026. (He would later go on to describe it, very cogently, on Lenny’s Podcast). Apparently, Jay and Navan’s team was one of the orgs that Deputy CTO of Microsoft Sam Shillace was referring to when he wrote I have seen the compounding teams in September last year.
The Dark Factory Inc. solves customers’ most difficult problems and ships solutions while most teams are still writing specs. Although still in its inception, the Dark Factory is humming.
Commoncog member James Cham, from Bloomberg Beta, will be facilitating. He is familiar with Jay and Navan as well as Commoncog’s community.
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