Dark Factory
Pabrik Gelap
A codebase, or part of one, where a software factory writes the code and no human ever reviews it.
A dark factory is the part of a codebase where a software factory writes the code and no human ever reviews it. No review, no approval, no eyes on the diff. The changes go straight to production and are caught, if at all, by the checks and by the users.
The term is deliberately uneasy. It works only where the risk of being wrong is genuinely low: a generated file that is obviously wrong, a migration with a verified rollback, a dependency bump with a green suite. It does not work where being wrong is expensive, and the discipline is being precise about which is which rather than assuming.
The practical safeguard is not human review of every change, which does not scale to a factory, but making the blast radius small. Changes that are easy to detect, easy to reverse, and easy to attribute to one automated path. A dark factory with a tight rollback and a good error budget is a reasonable thing to run; a dark factory touching money, permissions, or user data is not.
Related terms
Software Factory
A system of work where triggers, not humans, start agent sessions, so more work runs AFK.
AFK
A working pattern where the user starts a session and leaves the agent to run unattended.
Automated Check
A deterministic verification that runs in the environment: tests, type checks, lints, build. Pass or fail, no judgement.
Human Review
The user reading the code the agent produced and forming a judgement on it. Reading the diff counts; reading the summary does not.
Sandbox
An isolated environment the agent runs inside: container, VM, or restricted shell. It limits the blast radius.
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