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Notetiers, and their limits
Revised2026-07-24
Sources, and what each tier permits
A citation without a tier invites you to treat a press release the way you would treat a paper. Every source here carries one, and the legend says what it licenses you to conclude.
The tiers
- Primary The organisation's own engineering write-up, the paper, or the filing. Quote it.
- Reported A reputable secondary account — conference report, trade press, a credible independent write-up. Trust the shape, check the digits.
- Vendor A self-reported marketing metric with no independent measurement. Directional at best; never repeat it as a fact.
- Contested Disputed, or walked back by its own author. On this site it appears with its retraction attached, or it does not appear.
- First-hand This author's own operating records. Close to the evidence, and unverifiable by you — the two facts travel together. See the case study for what that can and cannot support.
The limits of this page
Three of them, stated up front, because a page about evidence quality that hides its own is worthless.
Most entries carry no link. This site was compiled from two research documents that recorded their citations by author, title, venue and date, and frequently without a resolvable URL. Manufacturing plausible links would have been trivial and would have produced exactly the failure this tier system exists to prevent. So the reference is what it is: enough to find the source, not enough to click.
Some dates are years rather than days. Where an entry reads 2026 with no
month, that is the resolution the compiled record carried — not a rounding. Narrowing it would
have meant guessing, and a guessed date on a page about dated evidence is worse than a coarse
one. The same applies to the as of line on any figure drawn from such a source.
The tiers describe the original source, not this site's reading of it. A Primary stamp means the underlying account is the organisation's own. It does not mean the sentence next to it on this site has been independently re-verified against that account. Where a figure matters to a decision you are making, go to the source.
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Software Factories, Light and Dark Primary
The light/dark framing, comprehension debt, back pressure, the outer loop.
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Harness Engineering is not Enough: Why Software Factories Fail Primary
The factory wiring diagram, the four-month unattended-factory report, the 3–10-step rule.
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12-Factor Agents Primary
"Own your control flow" — agents as explicit graphs rather than free-running loops.
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The Five Levels: from Spicy Autocomplete to the Dark Factory Primary
The autonomy ladder, modelled on the NHTSA/SAE driving-automation levels.
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Amplification and commentary on the five levels Reported
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Harness engineering Primary
Agent = Model + Harness; guides and sensors; computational vs inferential; the steering loop.
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The Ralph loop Primary
Fresh-context iteration, filesystem as memory. Later: "back pressure engineering", Gas Town.
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Software Factories and the Agentic Moment Primary
The reference dark factory: scenario-as-holdout, satisfaction scoring, the Digital Twin Universe.
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Minions, part 2 Primary
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Rewriting All of Spotify's Code Base, All the Time Reported
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Cloud agents and self-driving codebases Vendor
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Series C announcement and Droid performance claims Vendor
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Measuring the impact of early-2025 AI on experienced open-source developer productivity Contested
The headline result — experienced developers 19% slower with AI — was walked back by METR itself in February 2026 as methodologically unreliable for the current period. Never cite the number without the retraction.
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State of Code Developer Survey (1,149 developers) Reported
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Verification debt Primary
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Code Review tool — cost and finding rates Vendor
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Security findings in AI-generated code Reported
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Frontier agent capability on discriminative SWE-bench subsets Reported
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Why SWE-bench Verified no longer measures frontier coding capabilities Primary
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Built by Agents, Tested by Agents, Trusted by Whom? Reported
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Technology Radar, volumes 33 and 34 Primary
Cognitive debt, semantic diffusion, complacency with AI code, return to engineering fundamentals.
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Agent Factory (six-part series) Vendor
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Spec Kit Primary
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State of AI Agents Reported
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Lights-out manufacturing (continuous operation since 2001) Reported
Where the term comes from. Xiaomi opened a comparable plant in 2024.
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website-factory retro report First-hand
Run journal, judge verdicts, and the six accepted proposals from the outer loop.
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website-factory design note First-hand
The gate split: floor deterministic, quality judged, feel human.
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The four factory plugins First-hand
Repository state and READMEs as of the date given. Unpublished — cited by path, not by link.