[ekidd]

Having actually run some of the software produced by nearly "dark software factories," a lot of that software is completely shit.

Yegge's Beads is a genuinely good design, for example, but it's flakier and more broken the Unix vendor Motif implementations in 1993, and it eats itself more often than Windows 98 would blue screen.

I can actually run a bunch of orchestrated agents, and get code which isn't complete shit. But it's an extremely skill-intensive process, because I'm acting as product manager, lead engineer, and the backstop for the holes in the cognition of a bunch of different Claudes.

So far, the people promising completely dark software factories are either high on their own supply, or grifting to sell books (or occasionally crypto). Or so I judge from using the programs they ship.

[xg15]

I found it kind of fitting that didn't even describe what a human would still do at level 5 nor why it would be desirable. It's just the "natural" progression of a 5 step ladder and that seems to be reason enough.

[thenfcm]

Well isnt the point humans wouldn't need to do basically anything?

It would be 'desirable' because the value is in the product of the labour not the labour itself. (Of course the resulting dystopian hellscape might be considered undesirable)