The Software Factory as Identity Defense (and Reinvention)

When AI makes production cheap, the people whose standing rested on producing lose ground, and John Cutler reads the current wave of software factories as one response: move up a layer and govern the machines, so you stay central and still feel like a builder. He finds precedent in industrial history, with craftspeople who went from making goods to designing the systems that made them, and in the 2012 DevOps arguments over NoOps and the end of system administration. His worry is what the pattern does to teams. Engineering builds a factory that stays vague about everything before and after the code, product and go-to-market build factories for their own slices, and design is left in the middle. The cross-functional team that owns a problem from discovery to outcome gets quietly taken apart, "one professional silo at a time." The piece diagnoses more than it prescribes, but the question it leaves is a useful one to ask of any agent pipeline, including the ones we build: does it serve the whole path from problem to outcome, or only the layer its builder works in?