An AI dark factory is a repository that ships its own code. A spec goes in, workflows plan it, build it and validate it, and working software comes out the other end.
This is not 100% reliable yet. But three things are compounding at once – the models, the coding agents, and the harnesses we build around them – and that makes this realistic for most development now and all development in less than a year!
I have been running one against a live app since April. In this video I break it into the five components you actually have to build, and I show the skill I made so you can build your own without reverse-engineering mine. It ships the plumbing, because the plumbing is the same in every repo.
This also doesn’t replace how you already code with AI – it just makes your process more autonomous.
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Check out Parallel, the web-infrastructure layer that gives your AI agents access to the open web:
https://parallel.plug.dev/1c0NO5A
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– I just did a workshop in Dynamous giving a deeper dive into this AI Dark Factory setup. Join the community to check it out:
https://dynamous.ai
– The skill. Hand `/build-dark-factory` your PRD and it interviews you through all five components, then copies in a working runner – dispatcher, gate, guard, merge, state machine. `/plan-create-prd`, the one I mention for writing the PRD itself, is in the same repo:
https://github.com/coleam00/skills
– The app my Dark Factory built and maintains. Ask it anything about my channel (and my courses/workshops if you’re in Dynamous):
https://chat.dynamous.ai
– Archon, the open source workflow engine I run it on:
https://github.com/coleam00/archon
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0:00 What an AI Dark Factory Is
2:46 The Five Levels of AI Coding Autonomy
5:03 Installing the Build Dark Factory Skill
6:57 The Interview That Designs Your Factory
8:25 An App a Dark Factory Built
10:27 Sponsor: Parallel
11:38 Component 1: The Workflow-Driven Repo
13:40 Component 2: The Automation and Queue
16:16 Component 3: Blue-Green Deployment
18:04 Component 4: The Guidance Layer (3 Files)
20:58 Component 5: The Validation Harness
21:55 The Important Validation Strategies
23:49 Go Build One!
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Join me as I push the limits of what is possible with AI. I’ll be uploading videos weekly – at least every Wednesday at 7:00 PM CDT!
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