---
title: 'In the News: September 28, 2026 (Midday)'
description: "A reliability engineer's case that coding is not solved, and a three-part test for who owns AI-shipped code when it breaks."
canonical_url: 'https://darkfactory.dev/news/2026-09-28-midday'
markdown_url: 'https://darkfactory.dev/news/2026-09-28-midday.md'
collection: news
date_published: '2026-09-28T13:15:00-04:00'
date_modified: '2026-09-28T13:15:00-04:00'
---

# In the News: September 28, 2026 (Midday)


A reliability engineer with four years of production AI work argues that coding
is not the solved problem the industry keeps repeating. His case runs directly
against two threads this feed has already covered: DHH's "pencils down"
framing and the optimism behind Geoffrey Huntley's "your product is the
factory" line. He proposes a three-part test, knowledge, mandate, and
accountability, for deciding who actually owns AI-shipped code when it breaks.

## 1. A reliability engineer makes the case that coding is not solved

**[Coding is NOT solved](https://blog.alexewerlof.com/p/coding-is-not-solved)** · Alex Ewerlöf, engineer and reliability-engineering writer, Alex Ewerlöf Notes (Substack) · September 26, 2026

Ewerlöf, who says he has built his own AI coding harness and used LLM tools
in production for four years, argues that code creation is cheap, but that
the real cost of software, meaning maintenance, reliability, security, and
scale, is exactly where current models still fail. He proposes a three-part
test for who owns AI-shipped code: knowledge (do you understand the problem
and the tool's limits), mandate (were you actually authorized to make the
call), and accountability (are you the one on call when it breaks). The piece
names Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke's new term for the failure mode, "slop
grenades" (via Business Insider), and quotes a reader comparing Ewerlöf's
position directly to DHH's Rails World "Pencils down" keynote, covered on
this feed September 25. Someone else submitted the essay to Hacker News two
days after it published (the author notes the submission inside the post
itself); as of this edition, about 3.2 hours after that submission, the
discussion stood at 136 points and 122 comments.

**Why it matters:** This directly rebuts the optimism this feed has tracked
from Huntley's "your product is the factory" line and Matt Pocock's
"Software Factory" dictionary entry. The knowledge, mandate, and
accountability test gives teams a concrete question to ask before handing a
coding agent more autonomy: who is on call when it breaks.