Graph hype, or how I convince clients to steer clear of the typical “Dark Software Factory”[ukr]

If your development process looks like “I write a prompt in Claude Code, and then we get the job done using my favorite set of skills”—then you’re a year and a half behind the times, which, in our AI reality, is an eternity. Nowadays, graphs and self-improving loops are all the rage—you define a task, and it’s broken down into 100,500 separate blocks, each of which is simple, produces a measurable result, and is therefore easy to manage and improve. Sounds perfect? Yes—until you get tired of a simple task taking an hour and a half, or until you start calculating how much it costs (in money or tokens—it doesn’t matter).

Over the past six months, I’ve built six such factories as a consultant—all following the same blueprint—but now, with every new client, I start a long conversation explaining that you most likely either don’t need this approach, or you do—but in a different way. We’ll touch on three aspects—technological, economic, and cultural—to explain where the problems actually arise and why I no longer consider the “dark software factory” in its graph-and-block form to be a silver bullet for everyone.