Dan Grafham · Field Notes

Factorio did not predict the AI software factory.

The industry sizes MCP as a plugin.

The industry went loops-bad, then loops-good.

An instruction is one possible home for a rule, not the only one, and rarely the best one.

An AI-first factory gets to re-audit the whole testing inheritance.

Someone told me to show proof my agents ship work on their own.

The case against wrapping agents in control code is mostly right.

Rules pile up in the prompt, where nothing can enforce them.

Most agent systems bubble every failure up to a human supervisor at the top of the stack.

Most current prompt-injection mitigation is security theater.

AI makes it easy to build more.

The third distribution model after B2B and B2C.

Doctrine bifurcates into two registers: compiled doctrine a runtime enforces, and interpretive doctrine agents read.

Prompt engineering scales to one agent.

Why AI making code free didn't make shipping easier, and the specific traps that keep a genuinely good project permanently local.

What happens when the framework starts serving itself instead of shipping the product.

The substrate-level shift that the entire AI moment is producing.

Software was stuck single-celled for fifty years.

A deep dive into Level 5: what it actually requires, what it looks like in practice, and what kind of person could architect one.

A working framework for the current state of AI-assisted development, and a clear map of where the industry is heading.