I really like the premise of this article because I am intensely interested in learning about software factories. As much as "software factory" is a buzzword, it's still SOTA and it's absolutely going to happen / keep happening in the tech industry over the next few years.
However, I can't read this, not because I refuse to -- I want to -- but because my the cogs in my mind just stop whirring at all of the LLM-isms, my eyes glaze over, and I stop being able to follow what the article is trying to communicate to me. I would love for the OP to call me out and correct me (that they haven't used LLMs to write this).
I was bothered by the writing and fought through it, and carefully went through everything in the article... and you didn't miss anything. It's a tweet expanded to article length.
LLMs being used as a tool in general (and in the future) to automate creation and maintenance of software is not mutually exclusive to one person using LLMs to create an article.
writing prose and writing code are two different things
I can get good code out of LLMs. I can rarely get good writing out of them.
Maybe it's a skill issue, but it's not inherently a contradiction that they're better at some things than others. It's much easier to RL coding than writing.
I like to delete all AI comments, and write my own. If I can't write a comment, I don't understand the code well enough to have my name on the commit. I often delete the resulting comment, because AI likes to add many more than are necessary.
The factory analogy is tenuous, because real software is always bespoke, it’s not about producing gazillion copies of the same thing. Factories are about reliability and tolerances, aspects which are inherently intractable with LLMs.
One tragedy of this is that I stop reading when things don't make sense. There are a few connections in the article that seem tenuous. In the past I might have thought through it, considered the situation, and realized that the author had a different perspective and, if I shifted my mindset, there was a real insight there.
Now I just assume that it's AI-slop and there's no other "way of thinking" that I can adopt to make it sensible. I'm surely missing out on learning through some human-written articles, but the volume of slop means that I can't spend all my time digging through nonsense in the hope that there's a gem of insight.
In your second paragraph, that was true before AI-slop, at least for me. There was enough human slop that I couldn't bother to spend my time digging through it in the hope of finding a gem.
AI makes it worse, of course, because the ratio of slop to non-slop is worse.
True. I quit reading most of my subscriptions way before AI. Ironicall, now when we have AI, I can filter out the slop using my criteria for "gems". Recently vibe-coded some simple UI for this, would appreciate if you can try this: knoless.app
The most enlightening experience I had from programming was picking up Elixir for Advent of Code[0] 3 years ago. At that point in my career, I knew what I was doing and had built various apps and systems. TypeScript and React was my safe-space, but which I often committed the sin of over engineering things to be as functional as possible in.
I'd tried Go, which I didn't really like because it was too imperative for my taste and also required you to write every... single... thing you needed from scratch. (Not trying to start a flame war here -- it's just how I felt using it).
One of my engineers was kind of obsessed with Elixir (he was / is extremely smart) and he convinced me to give it a go over Christmas break. It really was the functional Valhalla he had made it out to be. I felt like I'd finally found a language that "got" how I wanted to approach writing code. Unfortunately, startup life got in the way, and I was hardly going to suggest an Elixir rewrite (well, I did try, but anyway).
I'm planning on re-approaching Elixir, as a haven to write code as a human. I still use LLMs for writing code pretty much daily, but if you're looking for something that's different and fun, I would recommend checking it out. It's just a shame to hear that the author is, for now at least, stopping their engagement with the community due to how they perceive it's changing!
It's probably the language that punches the furthest above it's weight in community size vs. what you can do with it (and what is being done with it professionally), and I don't think it's even close really. The quality and capability and breadth of libraries people publish is really incredible, from web all the way down to embedded.
> It's just a shame to hear that the author is, for now at least, stopping their engagement with the community due to how they perceive it's changing!
Want to clarify for others reading that the author of _Elixir_ isn't stopping, just the author of this post. José has been shockingly responsive on recent issue/pr threads I've posted on Elixir-related repos recently, often same day. They also don't seem to use any bot-based code review, which is incredibly refreshing in contrast to many other repos[1] in 2026 (Sorry for the callout, it's just such a good example). Elixir projects have been a joy as a fairly new contributor, compared to other ecosystems.
What did you need to write with golang? I found the exact opposite effect when I tested elixir and then went to go.
Exlixir has a great std lib but fewer packages than I'd like in the community. I can't even recall what I wanted!
With go the std lib seems bigger (although very lacking in some data structures) but the third party packages are incredible.
I also find both languages similarly useful since I was mostly interested in sane concurrent primitives in a lang. The OTP is not that useful to me since I haven't had to run these services in anything close to serious but you can (kinda) take the OTP to other languages (they're principles after all).
This is a great follow-up that I don't have a satisfactory answer for, because I can't really recall. I _think_ I was trying to do something with Firebase w/ high parallelism using goroutines. I just remember the feeling of imperativeness when I was iterating through results, etc, and not having a built-in mapping function.
Elixir was totally different -- was just scratching an "intellectual" itch, and it fit my needs like a glove in terms of feeling.
I'm confident that I could learn to like Go, though, lots of people I know rave about it.
> The OTP is not that useful to me
Also agree, didn't really get into OTP even, just enjoyed the style and structure of the language itself!
> were you influenced by personal events to write it?
I tried to build a Polymarket bot during Christmas break last year, and didn't get as far as I'd have liked to. But I spent a lot of time thinking about prediction markets thereafter and it certainly became a germination point for this story idea.
> The airgun is a subtle touch. I am in Florida, all kinds of cowboys here, are BBs legal in the UK?
I'm not sure actually -- it's great that you picked up on that detail though as I was trying to make that part more feasible for something based in the UK.
I tried to build a Polymarket bot during Christmas break last year, and didn't get as far as I'd have liked to. But I spent a lot of time thinking about prediction markets thereafter and it certainly became a germination point for this story idea.
However, I can't read this, not because I refuse to -- I want to -- but because my the cogs in my mind just stop whirring at all of the LLM-isms, my eyes glaze over, and I stop being able to follow what the article is trying to communicate to me. I would love for the OP to call me out and correct me (that they haven't used LLMs to write this).
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