Why it matters
In July 2025 Dex Horthy turned the lights off: an agent software factory where nobody read the code. It fell apart. An issue appeared that no amount of prompting could fix, the site was down, users were furious, and he was digging through a codebase he had stopped reading three months earlier.
My takeaway: Harness Engineering is not Enough: Why Software Factories Fail — Dex Horthy, HumanLayer is an agent-security signal. The practical read is that autonomy, memory, tool permissions, and third-party integrations are the control surface that needs threat modeling and monitoring.