Cole Medin builds a self-coding AI "Dark Factory" in public
Cole Medin is publicly handing an entire codebase to AI — using his open-source tool Archon to triage, implement, validate, and merge code with zero human-written lines.
Score breakdown
Developers exploring autonomous coding pipelines can follow this live experiment to study a real-world Dark Factory architecture — including its governance layer, anti-patterns, and Archon-based orchestration — as it ships production code in public.
- 01Cole Medin is running a public Dark Factory experiment where AI writes, reviews, tests, and merges all code with no human-written lines.
- 02The target application is a RAG-powered agent that answers questions about his YouTube content.
- 03His open-source tool Archon acts as the orchestrator, running triage, implement, validate, and fix workflows.
Cole Medin is publicly experimenting with what he calls a "Dark Factory" — a software development pattern where a codebase autonomously writes, reviews, tests, and merges its own code with no human-authored lines in between. The target project is a real application: a RAG-powered agent designed to answer questions about his YouTube content. Medin or members of the public file feature requests, and his open-source tool Archon — described as an AI coding workflow engine — orchestrates triage, implementation, validation, and fix workflows to ship the code automatically. The repository is live and all PRs are public.
The video covers the origins of the Dark Factory concept, levels of AI coding autonomy, the governance layer, and the continuous factory loop, as well as anti-patterns to avoid.
The video covers the origins of the Dark Factory concept, levels of AI coding autonomy, the governance layer, and the continuous factory loop, as well as anti-patterns to avoid. Medin references prior art including StrongDM's Attractor project (32,000 lines of Rust shipped by AI) and Spotify's background coding agent, which accumulated over 1,500 merged agent PRs. Archon is available as an open-source project on GitHub.
Key facts
- 01Cole Medin is running a public Dark Factory experiment where AI writes, reviews, tests, and merges all code with no human-written lines.
- 02The target application is a RAG-powered agent that answers questions about his YouTube content.
- 03His open-source tool Archon acts as the orchestrator, running triage, implement, validate, and fix workflows.
- 04Feature requests can be filed by Medin or the public; the repo and all PRs are publicly visible.
- 05The video references StrongDM's Attractor project: 32,000 lines of Rust shipped by AI.
- 06Spotify's background coding agent is cited as prior art, with 1,500+ merged agent PRs.
- 07Archon is available as an open-source project at github.com/coleam00/Archon.