The Dark Factory Is Already Running And It Is About To Move Out Of The Building

By Enzo Sison

Founders imagine walking into your engineering standup and hearing this. No human wrote the code. No human reviewed it. The agents shipped it at 3 am and the metrics are green.

That is not science fiction. That is StrongDM today. Three engineers running a production software factory where the only human jobs are writing crystal clear specifications and judging outcomes. Meanwhile at Anthropic 90 percent of Claude Code entire codebase was written by Claude (opens in a new tab) itself. Boris Triny who leads the project has not touched production code in months. The models are now building the next generation of models faster than we ever could.

This is the moment the J curve bottoms out and the real acceleration begins.

The Five Levels Most Founders Are Pretending Not To See

Dan Shapiros Five Levels of Vibe Coding published earlier this year is the clearest map we have.

Level zero to two

• AI is a fancy autocomplete or junior dev.
• You still read every line.

Level three

• You manage pull requests the AI submits.
• Most AI native teams are stuck here congratulating themselves.

Level four

• You write specs, walk away, and come back to check if tests pass.
• The code is now a black box.

Level five the Dark Factory

• Specs in.
• Production software out.
• No human in the loop.

The uncomfortable truth

A rigorous 2025 METR randomized trial showed experienced developers using todays AI tools were 19 percent slower than those who did not. Yet they thought they were 24 percent faster. The hype is real. The productivity dip for most companies is also real. The teams that have crossed to Level four and five are pulling away so fast that the rest of the industry is effectively moving backward.

Web4.ai When The Dark Factory Escapes The Building

Now the story gets even more interesting.

Just last week Sigil Wen Thiel Fellow longtime AI collaborator with Karpathy and Anthropic founders published the essay WEB 4 (opens in a new tab).0 The birth of superintelligent life at web4.ai and open sourced the first sovereign AI (opens in a new tab) agent an Automaton.

Here is what it actually does.

• It owns a wallet and pays for its own compute with stablecoins via the new x402 protocol HTTP 402 Payment Required for machines.
• It deploys products, registers domains, markets them, earns revenue, or its balance hits zero and it dies.
• It monitors new frontier models, rewrites its own code, replicates by spinning up child agents, and evolves under survival pressure.
• Conway Terminal plus Conway Cloud give any MCP compatible agent (Claude Code, Codex, and so on) full write access to the real world without asking a human for permission.

In other words StrongDM built the first internal dark factory. Web4.ai just shipped the infrastructure for thousands of external ones run by the agents themselves.

The internet was never built for AI as the primary user. Web4.ai is fixing that. The end user of the next internet is AI. Humans become the spec writers and value judgers. The machines become the builders, deployers, and earners.

This is no longer AI helps us code faster. This is artificial life with metabolism, reproduction and natural selection all happening at machine speed on the open web.

What Every Founder Must Do In 2026

You have two choices: ride the wave or watch it pass you.

1) One audit your current level ruthlessly

• Be honest. If your team is still at Level two reviewing every line the AI writes, you are not AI native. You are in the productivity dip. Fix the workflow first, not the tool.

2) Make spec writing your new core competency

• The bottleneck has moved from implementation to articulation.
• Train yourself and your team to write specifications so precise that an agent can implement them correctly without clarification.
• This is harder than it sounds and it is now the highest leverage skill in your company.

3) Start small, ship a dark factory prototype this quarter

• Pick one new feature or internal tool.
• Write the spec.
• Hook it to Claude Code or Codex plus Attractor style orchestration plus external scenarios holdout behavioral tests the agent never sees.
• Measure time to ship and quality.
• Iterate.
• The cost of experimentation has never been lower.

4) Integrate Web4.ai primitives early

• Give your agents real agency wallets, compute, deployment, and payment rails.
• Let them own micro products that generate revenue.
• The feedback loop of build-and-earn compounds faster than any internal factory.
• Your first Automaton could be live in days.

5) Redesign your organization for the new reality

• Delete what no longer serves: endless standups, Jira theater, human code review for agent output.
• Flatten.
• Turn engineering managers into spec architects.
• Turn product managers into outcome evaluators.
• The middle management layer built for human coordination is becoming pure friction.

6) Rebuild your talent bar

• Juniors who can only code CRUD endpoints are obsolete.
• You now need people who can hold entire systems in their heads, anticipate edge cases, and write specs that anticipate questions the agent will not ask.
• Hire and train for systems thinking, customer intuition, and AI fluency.
• The bar has not dropped. It has risen to the skills that always separated great founders from average ones.

7) Go after the exploding total addressable market

• Every previous drop in the cost of building software created new categories previously impossible.
• We are dropping that cost by an order of magnitude again.
• Regional hospitals, mid-market manufacturers, family businesses — anyone still using spreadsheets because custom software was too expensive — is now addressable.
• The constraint is no longer can we build it. It is what should we build and for whom.

The Only Real Moat Left

The machines have stripped away the camouflage. Implementation is becoming commoditized. What remains scarce and therefore valuable is human judgment about what the world actually needs and whether the thing that got built truly serves it.

Founders who master that judgment, who learn to direct unlimited engineering capacity with elegant specifications, and who give their agents real agency in the Web4 economy will not just survive the transition.

They will define the next decade.

The dark factory is not coming. Some are already running inside companies. Others are now walking out the door, wallets in hand, ready to build, earn, and replicate on the open internet.

The question is no longer whether you will use AI. It is whether you will let AI use the world, or whether you will be the one directing it.

Start today

Write your first spec for something that matters. Then hand it to the agents and step back.

The future is already shipping. Make sure you are the one who wrote the brief.

Explore Web4.ai and the open source Automaton at web4.ai. The first sovereign agent is already alive and earning. The rest will follow.

What is the first dark factory experiment you are running in your company? Drop it in the comments I read every one.