The Factory
Floor
06

From our floor

Darkening a website factory

Our website factory moves from brief to design, scaffold, iterative build and judgment, then publication. Studying which gates could go dark made the abstract model concrete.

01

A five-stage line

Briefhuman intent→Designcheap taste gate→Scaffolddeterministic→Build + judgebounded loop→Publishside effect

Verification is deliberately split: floor checks prove mechanical validity, independent judges assess visual and editorial quality, and a human feel check catches the residue the judges cannot name.

02

Three gates resist darkness

  1. 01

    Factual integrity

    A link can resolve and still be dishonest. Fabrication-prone sites need a person or a genuinely independent oracle.

  2. 02

    Feel

    The category is defined as what the judges miss. Removing the check does not make the residue zero; it makes it invisible.

  3. 03

    Public identity

    A production URL under a real name is reputational and cached. That side effect deserves an explicit policy boundary.

03

The retro loop is the dimmer switch

After each run, the factory retro records what humans caught after automated judges had passed. That creates the missing measurement: the marginal catch rate per gate.

Human catch0 catches over N comparable runsGate earns more autonomy →

Darkness becomes an evidence-based, archetype-specific asymptote. A gate can move darker when repeated runs show it adds no value, and move back toward light when catches return.

04

The recommendation

Keep litApprove the designthen walk awayRun darkBuild, brush, judge, deploy privatelypark on unresolved findingsKeep litMake the public side effect explicit
Build dark-after-design, terminate at a live private URL, keep fabrication-prone archetypes lit, and let retro evidence decide which gate goes dark next.

Dark-after-brief removes the cheapest, highest-leverage gate first. Dark-after-design captures nearly the same attention savings while preserving upstream judgment.