{
  "id": 8098613,
  "title": "I Accidentally Built a Dark Software Factory. Here's How.",
  "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/09/17/i-accidentally-built-a-dark-software-factory-heres-how",
  "topic": "ai",
  "section": "AI",
  "published": "2026-09-17T20:21:27.000Z",
  "source": {
    "name": "Dev.to",
    "slug": "dev-to",
    "url": "https://dev.to/bendechrai/i-accidentally-built-a-dark-software-factory-heres-how-27k7"
  },
  "original_language": "en",
  "account": "This article presents the origin story of the author's \"dark software factory\" called Holodeck. The piece begins by detailing how the concept came about three weeks after reading Steve Yegge's post on Fences, not Sandboxes, which advocated for rules-based approaches over strict guardrails.\n\nThe author's journey to creating Holodeck started with the challenge of getting Claude Code, an LLM harness they prefer, to run for extended periods. They attempted to create a long-running agent by feeding Claude one task at a time through a checklist mechanism. However, Claude would stop executing tasks after a few minutes due to context drift and forgetting the original todo list.\n\nThe author realized they needed to either prevent Claude from stopping or stop it from forgetting. It was during a break from work on the Claude problem that they had a moment of insight. They realized they could create a mechanism to feed Claude one item at a time, maintaining a fresh context window for each task. Claude would then need to keep track of its progress by documenting failures and retrying tasks that failed.\n\nOver the following days, the author worked with Claude to refine this approach. They added features such as documenting failures to prevent starting from a blank slate, starting the loop from the command line to avoid Claude dying, implementing deterministic tests to maintain guardrails, and adding a mechanism for the loop to exit once all tasks were completed.\n\nThe author then draws a parallel between the development of Holodeck and their passion for IoT projects, particularly their home automation system. The author's home is equipped with various automation features, including a garden irrigation system with 14 watering zones. They lamented the poor user interface of Home Assistant, the popular home automation platform.\n\nTaking inspiration from their Claude Code experiment, the author proposed a new NextJS app that could integrate with Home Assistant's API. The app would provide a simple instant messaging interface for users to interact with Claude Code, sending messages that would be executed as API requests and displayed as messages between a user and an assistant. The response from Claude would also be displayed as messages from the assistant.",
  "summary": "This is the first in a series of articles about my dark software factory, Holodeck. This one covers how it came to be and the principles underneath it. In future articles I'd like to dive into particular aspects in more detail. Want to know more about something I've written here? Hit me up on LinkedIn or Twitter and tell me what to write about next. Three weeks ago, I read Steve Yegge's post on…",
  "key_points": [],
  "editors_take": null,
  "illustration": null,
  "coverage": {
    "outlets": 1,
    "also_reported_by": []
  },
  "ai_generated": true,
  "disclaimer": "Summaries, key points and the editor’s take are written by software from other outlets’ reporting and may contain errors — always check the linked original."
}