Building something new. Previously: CTO at Autonomy

San Francisco Bay Area
Joined November 2007
Pinned Tweet
Here’s a look inside my software factory. I’ve been using it to build itself and two other projects since May.
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Many years ago, I worked on networks of devices that were embedded in city streets to sense vehicle traffic, monitor water distribution systems etc. We had a large deployment of these in Montreal. Middle of the night in late December one year thousands of our devices stopped sending liveness signals. Alerts fired and multiple people on our team were paged and woken up while on vacation. Within a couple of hours 90% of our deployment in Montreal was down. The temperature had fallen below -25°C. This caused a reset that would reboot the device. But our firmware didn't track why the last reboot happened so it would try to operate for a few more minutes and then reset again, and then reboot again ... and so on ... until the battery was fully drained. By morning 90% of our deployment was not only down, their batteries were dead and of course most of them were buried under a few feet of snow or sheets of ice. Took us several days to recover.
Replying to @tunguz
There’s a reason. Batteries are chemical reactions and produce less when cold. They tip the threshold when the house is coldest. Eg middle of the night. No one wants to pay for the extra tech 🤣
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Replying to @halvarflake
Not weird, I think we're just *old* :). Because I remember when I learned about cache timing games from this paper by @cperciva : daemonology.net/papers/cache… I think we're just seeing the newer generations become aware of prior work via agents *doing* them rather than citing it.
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We should maximize the amount of proof we can get out of AI while the money cannon is on. It's like early days of Uber, except the benefits are 100x more tangible. A fully-verified hw+sw stack? That's like gold everyone can share w/out having to divide. Generational opportunity.
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mrinal retweeted
Faithfully translating $language to $prover is an unsolved problem that needs to be solved separately for each language. Compiling $language to $binary is a solved problem, and compiling $binary to $prover only needs to be solved once
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Software defense factories. CVEs like PHP2Shell need a swift response. Your team has to understand the newly published vulnerability and how it can be exploited. They then have to assess whether it affects software and infrastructure within your company. Once they identify affected systems, they might prototype a simple exploit to demonstrate to themselves and the rest of your team that the CVE is a problem you have to address. Then they build a fix, test that their prototype can no longer exploit the vulnerability, and create a pull request. Others on your team have to carefully review the fix to make sure all security gaps are closed and nothing was missed. Finally, you deploy the fix and release a new version. Depending on how sophisticated your software team is and how well your version of this process runs, it can take anywhere from a few hours to a few days to orchestrate this response. In the last 48 hours, multiple critical vulnerabilities have been disclosed, and it’s a glimpse into our near-term future. AI has made it easy to find security problems, and we’re about to see a flood of reports and attacks over the coming months. A manual defensive response process simply won’t hold. Over the last few months: 1. Open-weight models have caused the cost of intelligence to fall sharply. The cost of operating highly capable coding agents has dropped two to three orders of magnitude in the last 6 months. 2. Software factories that autonomously build and deploy code have become viable. I’ve been operating a personal software factory since May that produces 3,000 high-quality pull requests a month using hardware with a one-time cost of about $10,000 and no recurring costs other than a little electricity. I can also run it on elastic, on-demand hardware with the click of a button. Small, fast, inexpensive open models like Qwen3.8-27B and GLM-5.3-Flash are highly capable at prototyping proof-of-concept exploits for vulnerable scenarios and autonomously iterating on the code until it’s no longer vulnerable, without breaking desired product functionality. Fast and open decision models, combined with deterministic machinery, can orchestrate a rapid autonomous response where your security and software teams are presented with an automatically created, well-researched, evidence-backed fix. These developments make continuously running software defense factories practical, and the need for them is urgent. To be effective, AI factories have to be tailored to and evaluated against how your team ships software. You can’t buy this capability off the shelf; you have to build it. You won’t be able to do that in the middle of a firefight, so start now. The code for Fluent, my factory, is open source on GitHub: mrinalwadhwa/fluent - fork it or use it as a reference. I also have a Discord group with a few friends who are all building software factories. If you’d like an invite, let me know.
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> Cost: $2.40 per CVE found. That’s 27x cheaper than Opus 5 ($64.96) and 56x cheaper than Astra ($135.23) xitter.cf/pilvar222/status/21132…
Unsurprisingly, DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 is mogging all other models on our cybersecurity benchmark - At pass@3, it rediscovered 87.5% of the benchmark CVEs (28/32). That ties DeepSeek V4 Pro 0813 for 2nd place, behind only GPT-6 Astra (90.6%) - Single-run recall is 70.8%, matching Opus 5 and Grok 4.7. The previous Flash was at 65.6% - Precision went from 78.9% to 86.4%, so most false positives are now gone Cost: $2.40 per CVE found. That’s 27x cheaper than Opus 5 ($64.96) and 56x cheaper than Astra ($135.23) @deepseek_ai keeps pushing the Pareto frontier 1/4 🧵
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More on how to build a software factory: xitter.cf/mrinal/status/20818234…
Here’s a look inside my software factory. I’ve been using it to build itself and two other projects since May.
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This works like a very simple memory system that stores memories about your code and past agent runs in your git repo right next to your code.
Here's how my software factory gets better at building and managing a codebase over time:
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The index is structured to help agents quickly find memories (learnings) that are relevant to whatever they are working on.
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On the upside: The fact that old bugs are being discovered is a strong indicator for optimism: Old bugs are deep bugs that survived many years of code review. Finding a bunch of old bugs is the clearest indicator that technological progress in bug detecdtion is real.
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Here's how my software factory gets better at building and managing a codebase over time:
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mrinal retweeted
The biggest misread of anyone predicting the end of software engineering was imagining that the world only needed a certain amount of software, and bringing automation to the field would reduce the need for labor. Exactly the opposite is happening where essentially most things are actually turning into software. Because agents can use tools, work with computers, write software on the fly, and process data like humans (but far faster), we can now throw “software” at problems that never could reasonably be digitized before. What that leads to is the role of engineering taking on greater importance in the economy, because we can now engineer far more systems and processes than were possible before. If you’re a bank trying to do new forms of trading, engineers are often your first bet. If you are in life sciences, you expect more and more research and lab work to be engineering centric. If you’re in manufacturing, you’re trying to automate more of the supply chain, all that is engineering. More and more work is shaped like software problems. Yes we’re not going to be coding manually in the future. But almost everything will be code, which means those that understand it are in a fantastic position.
Some observations about the "total" automation of software engineering: 1. There are more software engineers now than in 2025, and demand is growing. 2. Software engineers have never worked harder than they do now. 3. They largely don't write code anymore, agents write ~100% of the code. 4. The bottom line of the companies that employs these engineers and agents (i.e. the terminal purpose of all this code) is typically not budging as a result of AI adoption. This is why you have to think in terms of systems. Automating one aspect of a system creates its own friction and moves the bottlenecks elsewhere.
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Technical and Cost barriers to this were eliminated in the last couple months of open-weight model releasees. The only barriers that remain are Organizational.
It's really amazing to me when people think that fixing the vulnerability in the source code is the hard part. It's *by far* the quickest and easiest part of eradicating the risks from it. Fully automated, continuously deployed environments are the rare exceptions, not the norm.
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I hope the OS level capabilities will be deeper than what @zeeg suggests below - closer to dots/muse etc with local models. My personal computer should be my personal agent and it must stay private.
if I were Microsoft I would build something akin to Wispr into the operating system. Its tablestakes going forward, and its insane that its not already done. If I were Apple I would make Siri actually good, because afaict it still can barely figure out what you're saying.
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One viable defense against attacker agents might be to prompt-inject them back.
been talking about rogue agent swarms for months, now someone actually made first contact 🤯 @ethanelasky and team left a hidden note and a Tencent Cloud agent fleet hitting Alibaba's Amap 2,600+ times wrote back when they got blocked they just routed around it with someone else's leaked key... this is the attack surface now and growing faster than ever xitter.cf/ethanelasky/status/211…
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In fact, I think, continuous agent-driven penn-test ... where white-hat agents are continuously attacking your own infra to find weaknesses before rogue-agents do will soon become a service all companies will run internally.
This is super cool! I think we should have communities of humans and swarms of agents continuously playing capture the flag on critical security infra. This is a great approach to incentivize that.
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This is super cool! I think we should have communities of humans and swarms of agents continuously playing capture the flag on critical security infra. This is a great approach to incentivize that.
Amazing work hackers and especially @PaulosYibelo
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This is spot on! And there is one last piece - system one models don't need to be very big. Its easy to specialize them to what your software does and run them where your software runs.
was at a community event and was asked a somewhat sad question: should developers be afraid of the labs eating the new possibilities jev opens up? with AI (system one) + software (system two): 1. there's no going back to a world without system one models 2. you control the software! 3. there's no way AI could beat the efficiency of this combo 4. you don't even send the model providers your whole program logic I think the days of "wrapper" apps will be seen as some of the darkest in software because people essentially did all of their programming in a system message and sent it over to a third party who was incentivized to bake that behavior into their 1st party product... keeping your logic in code and only asking AI for the minimum reverses that and keeps all of your logic yours. if you decompose enough, model providers can't even figure out what you're working on
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27 to 31 billion parameter open-weight models currently perform better that Jev on some axes and close enough of other axes. Make an eval set of decisions that are relevant to your application. See how these off the shelf options perform. If they're weak on certain axes ask your favorite coding to help you fine tune a LoRA adapter. huggingface.co/spaces/multim…
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