The Superdark Factory: by 2029, code review becomes a formality as agents write 35T tokens a month
bratton · x · 2026-09-17
Benjamin Bratton shared The Superdark Factory (Antikythera/MIT Press), an interactive dashboard simulating a software company month by month from 2023 to 2029. Agent tokens rise from 18B to 35T per month while human engagement degrades step by step: from reading every diff, to skimming, to reading summaries, to questioning what approval even means.
The paper's core concept is "darkness": information that stays perfectly accessible and legible while ceasing to be useful, as total review gives way to sampled review and the approval gate becomes a formality. It's a thought experiment on the collapse of human oversight once software development is fully automated.
Related event: Superdark Factory Simulates AI Code Volume Swelling 4,600x by 2029(2 posts)→
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