By Joel Dare - Written August 11, 2026
Today I read an article that said a Dark Software Factory can’t work.
So, of course, I started building one.
The term “Dark Software Factory” isn’t well defined, but it’s basically a software business or project where AI writes all the code, creates all the tests, and deploys without any developer oversight. It’s dark.
It might start from a document or an issue written by a human and then the AI takes it from there. It works in a loop. Every bug is a new piece of content it automatically reads and acts on. A feature request from a PM, developer, or user.
After reading the article my mind went immediately to the success I’ve been having fighting bugs at work with AI. I’ve written skills that do almost everything for me. We use stories as a unit of work (Agile Stories). I basically use the command /do.story 12345
and Claude Code goes to work pulling that story, digging through logs to see what went wrong, looking at the source code in my sandbox, and developing a plan to fix the bug.
From there it’s a lightly guided journey. I direct the AI to change this or that, to look deeper here or there, and I give it any context that I think I know about the system. It’s not a Dark Factory but it feels like it’s not far out of reach either. I work on a complex suite of software. Hundreds of repositories that interact with each other, hundreds of thousands of lines of code, legacy cruft from 25 years ago through modern code from yesterday. Half a dozen different database systems that do different things for different people.
I’ve seen how much complexity humans can add to a codebase. Bots can add more, faster, but they can also refactor based on new direction. No software is bug-free.
I’ve had ideas for projects that I want to build but I have no time. A campfire conversation about what our own social network might look like. Me musing over the fact that I can’t easily create CAD designs on my phone.
I had to try it.
Within 15 minutes I ordered a modest $250 Mini PC that I could put behind my TV and I started this post. This will be a series that I add to over the following weeks as I build it.
For this to work, it really needs to be on 24/7. I can’t really close it and walk away, in the middle of its work, like I do with my laptop. My $1500 MacBook Air is also frustrating me right now. I underbought. Its specs only beat this little Mini PC by a small margin. Same RAM, 2x the disk space, and (maybe) 4x the processing speed. It was also 8x the cost and I bought it before the recent spike in prices. It’s my first personal MacBook and it’s also the first one I’ve had hardware problems with.
I’ve been wanting something that’s on all day. But I’ve been thinking about $3,500 machines. What if I could get something minimal? Something 1/10th the price. Could I live with it as a supplemental machine? That’s my backup plan or maybe it’s just justifying my decision to buy it.
I won’t be running a local LLM on this Mini PC anytime soon, but for most other workloads, it should be a good choice.
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