Programmer hasn't written code in months: Eleanor Berger on GPT-6 Astra and 'factory mode'
intellectronica · x · 2026-09-06
Eleanor Berger's blog post documents GPT-6 Astra feeling like a genuine step change: with a short one-shot prompt it controlled Blender and ElevenLabs to render an imagined future Zürich, and the same day it autonomously completed her August accounting (finding documents in email/drive and operating browser accounting software), built an addictive Tetris clone, optimized her iOS task app Flashboard, and redesigned her homepage with dozens of gorgeous options. Her takeaway: Astra is intuitive, knowledgeable, opinionated, and operates at superhuman speed.
The deeper shift is her workflow: after decades as a programmer she hasn't written a line of code in months while creating more software than ever — she calls it "factory mode", managing teams of agents that turn specs into software better than she could. She's teaming up with Hugo Bowne-Anderson to teach a course, Build Your Agentic Software Factory.
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