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KEYNOTE
Why Software Factories Fail
AT A GLANCE
Role
Co-Founder
Organisation
HumanLayer
Category
Hero
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Dex is currently focused on building AI coding agents that can tackle complex problems in large codebases at HumanLayer. His talk "No Vibes Allowed" from the AIE Code Summit in NYC is in the top-5 most watched AI Engineer videos of all time. He also worked on APIs for agent orchestration and human-in-the-loop systems, and authored the April 2025 essay “12 Factor Agents,” coining the term “Context Engineering.” He has been coding since high school, when he built tools for NASA researchers to navigate the Moon’s south pole, and is an enjoyer of tacos and burpees—though not necessarily in that order.
TALK
Why Software Factories Fail
We spent the last year building the software factory: sandboxes, orchestration, code review, skills, feedback loops. The factory is mostly built — so what happens if we turn the lights off. I'll trace the short, dramatic history of the lights-off factory — from Ralph to strongDM to the hype cycle to the spring cool-off, when many teams learned the hard way that agents can't be trusted in a production codebase without human judgment. The culprit isn't something you can code or prompt your way around. It's that today's models are trained to make the test pass, not to improve the codebase over time — locally correct, globally corrosive. They can write code; they can't yet do architecture. We'll look at what a better benchmark would have to measure — maintainability, navigability, blast radius, outcomes over time — and what that means for the work in front of us right now. Until models can architect, judgment has to re-enter the loop above the code: humans deciding what gets built, a level up from the diff. That's not a bottleneck to automate away. It's the steering wheel — and it's where the next year of progress actually lives.
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