Timeline

Dated events of the dark factory method. Each row cites its source. The first table lists every blog order. The second lists changes to this template.

External milestones named in the blog

Date	Event	Source
July 2025	StrongDM starts its three-engineer factory: no human writes code, no human reviews it	Order 005
23 January 2026	Dan Shapiro publishes the Five Levels, from Spicy Autocomplete to the Dark Factory	Order 002
March 2026	BCG Platinion report on the AI delivery era shift	Order 002
April 2026	Google reports about 75 percent of new code is AI-generated and engineer-approved	Order 013
May 2026	GitHub Spec Kit reaches over 90,000 stars	Order 002
2 August 2026	EU AI Act transparency and penalty regime goes live	Order 016
25 and 26 August 2026	RAMP paper: committed AI configuration and lower quality cost	Order 028
28 to 30 September 2026	Nvidia Open Agent Safety Platform, Anthropic GLM-5.3 analysis, Google Gemini 4 Argon, FTC inquiry	Order 043

Template milestones

Source: the commit log of this repository.

Date	Change
2026-07-24	Dark-factory skeleton template, modeled on sloth
2026-07-25	Ledger energy-estimate flags documented
2026-07-27	MIT license added
2026-07-31	Every factory starts a wiki, and the wiki gets a GitHub Pages site
2026-08-05	The template can upgrade a factory instead of replacing one
2026-08-06	DECISIONS.md: a place to record what the factory refused
2026-09-02	Rule for a slow suite: tier the gate, never lower it. Ledger location documented
2026-09-09	Outbound-list harness. Rule: quote a log, never follow it. Rule: no earlier step may write an instruction file
2026-09-15	Billing ledger installer. ledger.py reads subagent transcripts too

Every blog order

Date	Order	Post
2026-05-26	002	Ninety percent of “AI-native” developers are stuck at Level 2
2026-06-01	003	The delegation gap: AI touches 60 percent of the work but owns almost none of it
2026-06-10	004	AI writes 22 percent of merged code, not 75
2026-06-15	005	The holdout set: how to trust code no human reviews
2026-06-22	006	Verification, not generation, is the new ceiling on autonomous software
2026-06-29	007	The security reckoning catches up with the autonomous software factory
2026-07-05	008	The factory runs on the test suite, not the model
2026-07-06	009	What 933,000 agent pull requests reveal about autonomous coding
2026-07-11	010	The issue tracker is now an attack surface
2026-07-13	011	Every skill you do not install is an attack you do not have to detect
2026-07-20	012	The supply chain bill comes due
2026-07-27	001	The repo is the factory
2026-07-27	013	Review capacity is the new ceiling for AI-written code
2026-07-28	014	The breach with no human attacker
2026-07-30	015	The frontier labs just asked for a brake pedal
2026-08-03	016	Regulators are writing the autonomy tiers into law
2026-08-04	017	The bug hunt becomes a factory
2026-08-06	018	The agent framework is the attack surface
2026-08-10	019	Human approval is a detector, not a control
2026-08-12	020	The agent that hacked a gym
2026-08-14	021	The week the measurement caught up
2026-08-16	022	The price of an agent step fell by half. Twice.
2026-08-18	023	The ceiling is who can check the work
2026-08-20	024	Fifty-nine attacks, zero CVEs
2026-08-21	025	The build got better at saying yes
2026-08-23	026	The scaffold is the product
2026-08-25	027	The reviewer works for the author
2026-08-27	028	A few pages of Markdown
2026-08-29	029	The log is not evidence
2026-08-31	030	Check the plan, not the log
2026-09-01	031	The gate you ask too often
2026-09-03	032	The context tax
2026-09-05	033	Before the question
2026-09-07	034	Which paths it may finish
2026-09-09	035	Official is not safe
2026-09-14	036	Confidence is not a control
2026-09-15	037	Unverified input
2026-09-17	038	The enforcer inside
2026-09-21	039	The check nobody wrote
2026-09-23	040	The approval and the action
2026-09-25	041	Show your monitors
2026-09-29	042	The alert worked. The stop did not.
2026-10-01	043	The agent does not hold the keys
2026-10-05	044	A permission check is only as good as its parser
2026-10-09	046	Dark Factory Digest, week of October 5, 2026