“And so of course it feels like a slop factory because your lived experience for the most part is that it is a slop factory. And so if somebody comes and says to you, Hey, I have this technique that's going to make the slop factory go even faster. Are you in? You're like, absolutely not.”
Syntax (Wes Bos & Scott Tolinski) · Hands-On Engineering Podcasts · October 2026
Jacob explains why developers distrust the "software factory" idea. Teams that kept their old process while shipping thousand-line AI pull requests nobody understands are stuck in the surf zone. Paradoxically, he says, the way out is more automation and structure, not less.
Transcript
…because you're talking about those, those, those elements of like, of trust, of repeatable automation, right? Like, how do I get the system to behave the same way every time as we go through this process, regardless of who the engineer or the product person is that's putting in the inputs, right?
…that trust, or let's say we want to standardize the process for something that happens over and over again. I think most people would agree with that being something that they needed. But in the same regard, a lot of people might look at a software factory as just being like a slot factory, right?
…I didn't come up with the software factory word, but it is what people are calling it. You know, like I helped come up with like DevOps, for example, and I have regrets about how that work went out into the world. And like, I'm sure the software factory people probably have some regrets about how that metaphor has taken hold. But like, you know, ultimately, that process is the critical piece. And so of course it feels like a slop factory because your lived experience for the most part is that it is a slop factory. And so if somebody comes and says to you, Hey, I have this technique that's going to make the slop factory go even faster. Are you in? You're like, absolutely not. You know, like the thing that's killing me, I do not want more of it. You know,
I have a question about like specifically companies that have lots of engineers and are sort of like looking at like, how do we tackle this, right? You, like, you just gave an example of like 10 engineers, but I think about like, I remember hearing a stat that like LinkedIn has like 300 engineers…
Yeah, man, that's a good question. And I, I sort of believe that there's two emerging frontiers happening in AI. So like one frontier is the labs and all the things that they're doing. The other frontier is the answers to these questions. You know, like, how do we as regular mortal? You know, like…
Have you seen any large companies that have like at least started to take this on or switch toe?
More from Syntax (Wes Bos & Scott Tolinski)
