The Discord server had been someone else's idea. A developer in Portland had set it up the week after factory.strongdm.ai went live, and by September it had two thousand members. By October, three thousand. Someone made a bot that posted every new commit to the Attractor, CXDB, Leash, and Agate repositories. The bot was busier than most human engineers.
On November 12th, the server hit five thousand members. Navan noticed because he lurked there under a handle that he believed was anonymous but that everyone had figured out within the first week. His iGopherBrowser profile picture was distinctive.
"They made a new channel," Navan reported at the morning stand-up, which was not really a stand-up because Justin didn't believe in stand-ups but was instead a shared silence during which all three of them read their dashboards and occasionally said things. "It's called #fan-theories."
"Theories about what?" Jay asked.
"About us. About the factory. About what we're building next."
Jay leaned over to look at Navan's screen. The channel was already three hundred messages deep. He started reading.
The first theory was that the Digital Twin Universe would eventually model more than SaaS APIs. Someone hypothesized it would model internal microservices, then databases, then infrastructure itself. The twin of the infrastructure running the twins. Jay blinked. That was not wrong.
The second theory was that satisfaction metrics would evolve into a general-purpose software quality framework, decoupled from the factory entirely. A portable metric. Jay looked at the whiteboard. That was also not wrong.
The third theory was that Agate's convergence loop—goal, interview, design, sprint, implementation, assessment—was intentionally modeled after a dynamical system's approach to a strange attractor, and that the name was not a metaphor but a literal description of the mathematics. Jay looked at Justin, who was reading his own screen and had not spoken in eleven minutes.
"Justin, have you seen the #fan-theories channel?"
"Yes."
"Theory number seventeen says that CXDB's branch-from-any-turn architecture was designed to support agent memory that works like human episodic recall. Forking a conversation at an arbitrary point to explore a counterfactual."
Justin took a sip of his tea. "What about it?"
"Is that... is that true?"
"The architecture supports it. Whether it was designed for that specific purpose is a question about intent, and intent is less interesting than capability."
Navan was scrolling faster now. "Theory twenty-three says the NLSpec approach will make programming languages obsolete within a decade."
"That one's wrong," Justin said mildly. "Programming languages won't become obsolete. They'll become compilation targets. There's a difference."
Jay sat back. The theories kept coming, posted by people in time zones spanning the globe. Students, engineers, architects, researchers. Some theories were wild speculation. Some were eerily precise. A few described things that were on the internal roadmap, described in language that was almost identical to the internal documents.
"Should we be worried about this?" Jay asked.
"No," Justin said. "We open-sourced the methodology. This is what open source looks like when people actually read the source."
Navan pinned theory number seventeen to his personal channel. Jay bookmarked the whole thread. Justin went back to his screen and did not comment further, which was its own kind of commentary.
I'm in that Discord and I can confirm the theories channel is exactly like this. Someone posted a theory about gene transfusion last night that was basically a design doc.