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jaytayloron Why Software Factories Fail (or: harness engineering is not enough)

We are working on new articles to share our latest findings, so stay tuned! Overall our outlook continues to be bullish. Almost all software problems yield to a combination of the Factory Techniques covered on the strongdm.ai website. More powerful models work even better...

jaytayloron Why Software Factories Fail (or: harness engineering is not enough)

Hi, I'm one of the trio from the StrongDM AI Lab.

Just a minor thing I want to clarify about the Weather Report [1] - it's framed in kind of a negative light in the article ("sparse updates"), but we've been updating it as frequently as we find a meaningful improvement in a relevant dimension. Since we launched it in February it has averaged about one update per month, as frontier labs keep racing forward!

[1] https://factory.strongdm.ai/weather-report

jaytayloron Software factories and the agentic moment

I'm testing a theory that large-scale (LoC) generated projects in Rust tend to have fewer functional bugs compared to e.g. Go or Java because Rust as a language is a little stricter.

I've not yet formed a full opinion or conclusion, but in general I'm starting to prefer Rust.

Re: generalizing mocks, it sounds interesting but after getting full-fidelity clones of so many multi-billion dollar SaaS offerings, I really like it and am hooked. It pays nice dividends for developing using agentic coders at high scale. In a few more model releases having your own exhaustive DTU could become trivial.

jaytayloron Software factories and the agentic moment

> The Go to Rust rewrite is interesting - was that driven by performance or more about the ecosystem/tooling for this kind of work?

I'm testing a theory that large-scale (LoC) generated projects in Rust tend to have fewer functional bugs compared to e.g. Go or Java because Rust as a language is a little stricter.

I've not yet formed a full opinion or conclusion, but in general I'm starting to prefer Rust.

jaytayloron Software factories and the agentic moment

(DTU creator here)

I did have an initial key insight which led to a repeatable strategy to ensure a high level of fidelity between DTU vs. the official canonical SaaS services:

Use the top popular publicly available reference SDK client libraries as compatibility targets, with the goal always being 100% compatibility.

You've also zeroed in on how challenging this was: I started this back in August 2025 (as one of many projects, at any time we're each juggling 3-8 projects) with only Sonnet 3.5. Much of the work was still very unglamorous, but feasible. Especially Slack, in some ways Slack was more challenging to get right than all of G-Suite (!).

Now I'm part way through reimplementing the entire DTU in Rust (v1 was in Go) and with gpt-5.2 for planning and gpt-5.3-codex for execution it's significantly less human effort.

IMO the most novel part to this story is Navan's Attractor and corresponding NLSpec. Feed in a good Definition-of-Done and it'll bounce around between nodes until it gets it right. There are already several working implementations in less than 24 hours since it was released, one of which is even open source [0].

[0] https://github.com/danshapiro/kilroy

jaytayloron Speed up responses with fast mode

Yes, Claude code.

jaytayloron Speed up responses with fast mode

Can this work for Claude? I think it might be raw API only.

jaytayloron Software factories and the agentic moment

(StrongDM AI team member here)

This is great feedback, appreciate you taking the time to post it. I will set some agents loose on optimization / purification passes over CXDB and see which of these gaps they are able to discover and address.

We only chose to open source this over the past few days so it hasn't received the full potential of technical optimization and correction. Human expertise can currently beat the models in general, though the gap seems to be shrinking with each new provider release.

jaytayloron Software factories and the agentic moment

I'm one of the StrongDM trio behind this tenet. The core claim is simple: it's easy to spend $1k/day on tokens, but hard (even with three people) to do it in a way that stays reliably productive.

jaytayloron Ask HN: Share your personal website

https://jaytaylor.com (personal site)

All of my web properties have been ad-free since the beginning, going on 25 years. Cheers.

jaytayloron Three Years from GPT-3 to Gemini 3

(Co-creator here) This is one of the use cases for Leash.

https://github.com/strongdm/leash

Check it out, feedback is welcome!

Previously posted description: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45883210

jaytayloron The Paranoid Guide to Running Copilot CLI in a Secure Docker Sandbox

Leash does it via eBPF today. Are you open to a collab?

jaytayloron The Paranoid Guide to Running Copilot CLI in a Secure Docker Sandbox

This is a really neat project .

At my company (StrongDM) we recently open-sourced a tool in this space called Leash: https://github.com/strongdm/leash

By default it runs in docker, and also includes an extra sophisticated macOS-native --darwin mode which goes beyond the capabilities and guarantees of the likes of sandbox-exe, bubblewrap, and in some ways docker. Leash provides visibility into and control over every command and network request attempted by the coder agent. Would appreciate any feedback, and will try to get in touch with the author (Gordon).

Now I'll definitely look into automatically supporting pass-through auth for at least gh cli in Leash - always looking for what folks will find useful.

jaytayloron Using bubblewrap to add sandboxing to NetBSD

Have you seen Leash?

https://github.com/strongdm/leash

It even has a --darwin macOS-native mode which goes beyond the capabilities and guarantees of sandbox-exec and bubblewrap.

Full-disclosure: I am one of the authors.

jaytayloron Hacker News Live Feed

https://jaytaylor.github.io/hn-live2

Enjoy!

jaytayloron X-Mouse Button Control User Guide (friendly HTML version)

X-Mouse Button Control (XMBC for short) is a handy Windows app to override mouse buttons to do arbitrary other actions on a program/App -specific basis.

https://www.highrez.co.uk/downloads/XMouseButtonControl.htm

However the docs (which are excellent!) were published by the developer as PDF-only, so I did a nice transform to HTML and posted it on my personal website. I will do my best to host it until I'm dead, and also submitted it to TIA:

https://www.highrez.co.uk/downloads/X-Mouse%20Button%20Contr...

https://jaytaylor.com/x-mouse-button-docs/

Forever TIA link: https://web.archive.org/web/20240825203006/https://jaytaylor...

Cheers,

Jay

jaytayloron Use plain-text email

Years ago I made a Go library called `html2text' just for this:

https://github.com/jaytaylor/html2text/

https://jaytaylor.com/html2text

It takes HTML as input and generates markdown-esque plaintext, with the main focus being to make the plaintext version easy and pleasant to read for human beings. Then using MIME types*, you transmit both the rich html version alongside the generated text/plain version.

This is cool because it makes it easy to respect both rich clients (like Gmail et. al.) as well as command-line or other clients which work better with simple text.

Hope this helps folks have the best of both worlds! :) cheers

* n.b. To ensure this works properly, be sure to use the right MIME headers:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3902455/mail-multipart-a...

jaytayloron Reverse-engineering the Apollo spacecraft's FM radio

Hygroscopic, an interesting new word to me! Thank you :)

> hy·gro·scop·ic

> adjective

> (of a substance) tending to absorb moisture from the air. relating to humidity or its measurement.

jaytayloron Ask HN: Can competitors catch up to Apple Silicon?

I didn't know the word internecine, it's actually really useful and relevant in many situations, thank you!

> internecine, adj.:

> destructive to both sides in a conflict.

jaytayloron How Websites Die

Underscores aren't technically valid in URLs or domain names ;D

That minor implementation detail aside... You make a good point. Perhaps MD5 or SHA256 hashes will become a last resort for domain names? Haha, no.

jaytayloron How Websites Die

> I’ve often thought about getting together with some friends to pay into a fund to house our websites after we die. I don’t think setting that up would be too hard — the math around insurance policies of this sort is quite simple — I mostly haven’t tried to set something like this up just since it’s a pretty morbid ask. But, if you’d be interested, maybe reach out to me?

> Our ghosts could live forever, if we help each other.

I love this idea and would gladly assist in the effort, let's set it up :)

jaytayloron Great America, a beloved Bay Area theme park, to shut down within next 11 years

The Klingons were hella cool! Wish I could have appreciated it more as a kid, but at the time (early 90s) I didn't even know what I was looking at or how special it was :D

jaytayloron The most satisfying checkbox

Tangentially related:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28489791 - Checkboxland

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28826018 - I keep making things out of checkboxes

jaytayloron Goroutines Under the Hood (2020)

> It hasn't been cooperative for a few versions now, the scheduler became preemptive in 1.14. And before that there were yield points at every function prolog (as well as all IO primitives) so there were relatively few situations where cooperation was necessary.

Since co-op was most unnecessary, do you know why it was changed to preemptive or what the specific cases were that are resolved with preemptive scheduling?

jaytayloron SQLite may become foundational for digital progress

Litestream can ensure a pretty decent level of durability, for a ramdisk anyway.

Suitability depends on what the requirements are.

jaytayloron What are your most used self-hosted applications?

Also posted yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31252441

No discussion as of yet, but I favorited it because I plan to try it out in the near future.

Thank you binwiderhier for doing all this hard work, your drive is impressive!

jaytayloron What was wrong with SML?

Is your development progress taking place in the open? (e.g. GitHub or somewhere similar)

It sounds like a cool project and I'd love to see it! And even have the option to open a PR and help ;)

jaytayloron Ask HN: Beyond AWS/Azure/GCP, what cloud providers should I know more about?

Also Oracle OCI has OKE, which is Oracle Kubernetes Engine. It works nicely and the quality of service has been very good in my experience over the past four years.

Disclaimer: I currently work at Oracle.

jaytayloron Strategies and patterns of gray hat social media automation

If there was a way to subscribe to email notifications whenever you post, I totally would!

In case it's helpful as a reference, the righto.com guy has a nice setup.

jaytayloron Strategies and patterns of gray hat social media automation

Is there an RSS feed for your articles?