Software Factory Archive

Navan found it first. He was scrolling through his RSS feeds on a Tuesday morning, procrastinating on a particularly stubborn Cedar policy refinement, when a link caught his eye. The title was "The First Scenario" and the author was listed as "factory_observer."

He clicked it.

Three paragraphs in, his coffee went cold. Five paragraphs in, he stood up from his desk. Seven paragraphs in, he walked into the shared workspace and said, very calmly, "Someone is writing fan fiction about us."

Jay looked up from his terminal. "What do you mean, fan fiction?"

"I mean prose. Narrative prose. About the factory. About us, specifically. There's a story where I trace a malformed SCIM payload in the logs. There's a story where you debug a Slack twin at two in the morning. There's a story where Justin closes his laptop and says 'welcome to the factory' and it's written like a moment of revelation."

Jay's face went through several stages. Curiosity. Confusion. A dawning, spreading horror. "Do they... do they use our real names?"

"Full names. GitHub handles. There's a tag for your html2text library."

"Oh no."

"Oh yes," Navan said, and he was grinning now, wide and uncontrollable. "Jay, there are forty-seven kudos on the first story. There are comments. Someone with the handle 'agent_whisperer' is quoting you."

Jay put his head on his desk. "What am I quoted as saying?"

"'We describe the world more accurately, and the agents fix the code.' Which, to be fair, you did say almost exactly that during your first week."

"I know I said it. I didn't say it for an audience."

Justin walked in carrying a bowl of something from the kitchen. He glanced at Navan's screen over his shoulder, read for about ten seconds, and set his bowl down. Then he pulled up a chair, sat next to Navan, and began reading from the beginning.

He read every word.

He read the first story, then the second, then the third. He read a story about his whiteboard equation. He read a story about the Attractor pipeline. He read a story where a fictional version of himself explained NLSpecs to someone at a conference and the fictional audience member said "so the spec is the product?" and fictional Justin said "the spec has always been the product."

"That's pretty close," Justin said, not looking up.

"To what you'd actually say?" Navan asked.

"To what I actually said. At KuppingerCole. Almost verbatim." He scrolled down. "The characterization of the DTU is accurate. The description of satisfaction metrics is correct. Whoever wrote this has read the published material carefully."

Jay still had his head on his desk. "Justin, someone is writing stories about us."

"Someone is writing stories about the methodology," Justin corrected. "We happen to be in them because we built the methodology. The stories are about the work." He paused. "They're also pretty good."

Navan bookmarked the archive. Jay groaned. Justin kept reading.

By the end of the day, Justin had read every published story. He sent one link to the StrongDM general Slack channel with no commentary. Just the URL. Navan added it to his physical notebook under the heading "Things I Did Not Expect." Jay changed his Slack status to "please do not write fan fiction about me" and then, against his better judgment, read every word himself.

He left a kudos on three of them. Anonymously. He thought.