The term "dark factory" turns up unprompted, twice, in one Hacker News thread

Jake Saunders described, in a post drawing 63 points and 42 comments, a home-server pipeline for building software with agents rather than running it on someone else's cloud. The build drew the usual production questions: several commenters pressed on what verification looks like once a system like this reaches production, and one noted the setup was not fully self-hosted since it still leans on a Codex subscription for inference. What stood out inside the thread, rather than the post itself, was that two commenters used the term dark factory without prompting, and neither is a voice this lane already tracks. codazoda wrote they were "recently inspired by another article here to start" their own build, linking a separate series at joeldare.com documenting a minimal dark factory. mettamage put it more generally: "Quite a lot of people are automating the SDLC now and are looking at dark factory solutions."

Why it matters: This is a small, direct data point that the term is moving past the corner of the internet that coined it and into general practitioner vocabulary, worth noting for anyone tracking how this space names itself. This run did not load Saunders' underlying blog post, so its build details are not confirmed here beyond what the thread itself describes.