It’s been funny watching y’all argue about who owns the future in which self-running software factories are pervasive. Is it PMs, engineers, or solo founders? Duh, it’s me and a bunch of my friends 😛 OK, yes, and some of y’all can come along because, as of late 2026, we still need you to build the software factory for us.
So, you can you please stop retweeting stuff like “AI runs companies without engineers now. Three people, no engineers, ships itself” and move on with building it already? Yours is going to look different from theirs anyway, so you can safely ignore X.
You’re going to need engineers because, for example, StrongDM’s Dark Factory was built by engineers. This is the absurdity at the heart of the so-called “standoff” between engineers and PMs (and by extension executives). The meme says AI lets you replace engineers. The reality says you need your best engineers more than ever, doing work they’ve never done before, and you need to lead them there.
Martin’s notes this week included a quote from Jack Danger’s Executive Engineering: “As an executive leading a modern software team, your people face huge complexity. The territory in which your engineering teams work is literally interconnected concepts written down. Leadership needs to be some kind of guidance through that maze.”
The software factory is an engineering problem, but it’s also a culture change problem that needs real leadership. Leadership matters more now, not less. The self-running company is not going to succeed in a top-down way. Top-down organizational change has a distinguished track record — right up there with New Coke and the Soviet five-year plans.
You need leaders who can bring engineers along on a transformation that sounds, to the engineer, like the elimination of their job. You need leaders who can articulate a vision more compelling than “we’ll spend $1,000 a day on tokens and stop reading code.” You need leaders who understand that the StrongDM team succeeded because three skilled people trusted each other and iterated in a room together — not because someone issued a top-down directive to “go faster.” That never worked and won’t work now. The leaders who succeed at this will be the ones who have real credibility and can look the engineering org in the eye and say: “This is going to change how we work and I need you for it. What do you need from me?”
So, please stop squabbling and start building our factory. I promise we won’t turn you into paperclips, at least not until Q4’27.
Sources: How StrongDM’s AI team build serious software without even looking at the code — Simon Willison, Feb 2026 · Executive Engineering — Jack Danger, 2024 · Haste Is Your Weakest Input — Martin Remy, 2022
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