Why software factories are back - and how they work in the age of AI

AI is breathing new life into the decades-old concept of the "software factory" — a system where prototype apps are submitted and automatically mass-produced for wide release. Leading companies like Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI are independently converging on the same six-component architecture. The bottleneck is no longer coding, but verification: ensuring AI-generated code is actually correct remains a hard, unsolved engineering problem.