Saturday, 7th February 2026
How StrongDM’s AI team build serious software without even looking at the code
Last week I hinted at a demo I had seen from a team implementing what Dan Shapiro called the Dark Factory level of AI adoption, where no human even looks at the code the coding agents are producing. That team was part of StrongDM, and they’ve just shared the first public description of how they are working in Software Factories and the Agentic Moment:
[... 1,664 words]I am having more fun programming than I ever have, because so many more of the programs I wish I could find the time to write actually exist. I wish I could share this joy with the people who are fearful about the changes agents are bringing. The fear itself I understand, I have fear more broadly about what the end-game is for intelligence on tap in our society. But in the limited domain of writing computer programs these tools have brought so much exploration and joy to my work.
— David Crawshaw, Eight more months of agents
Claude: Speed up responses with fast mode.
New "research preview" from Anthropic today: you can now access a faster version of their frontier model Claude Opus 4.6 by typing /fast in Claude Code... but at a cost that's 6x the normal price.
Opus is usually $5/million input and $25/million output. The new fast mode is $30/million input and $150/million output!
There's a 50% discount until the end of February 16th, so only a 3x multiple (!) before then.
How much faster is it? The linked documentation doesn't say, but on Twitter Claude say:
Our teams have been building with a 2.5x-faster version of Claude Opus 4.6.
We’re now making it available as an early experiment via Claude Code and our API.
Claude Opus 4.5 had a context limit of 200,000 tokens. 4.6 has an option to increase that to 1,000,000 at 2x the input price ($10/m) and 1.5x the output price ($37.50/m) once your input exceeds 200,000 tokens. These multiples hold for fast mode too, so after Feb 16th you'll be able to pay a hefty $60/m input and $225/m output for Anthropic's fastest best model.
Vouch. Mitchell Hashimoto's new system to help address the deluge of worthless AI-generated PRs faced by open source projects now that the friction involved in contributing has dropped so low.
The idea is simple: Unvouched users can't contribute to your projects. Very bad users can be explicitly "denounced", effectively blocked. Users are vouched or denounced by contributors via GitHub issue or discussion comments or via the CLI.
Integration into GitHub is as simple as adopting the published GitHub actions. Done. Additionally, the system itself is generic to forges and not tied to GitHub in any way.
Who and how someone is vouched or denounced is up to the project. I'm not the value police for the world. Decide for yourself what works for your project and your community.