Predictions - Software Factories

March 22nd, 2026

We are moving towards "Software Factories".

Anthropic, OpenAI, and Cursor will double-down (and then triple-down) on their custom "AI IDEs". Terms like "Self Driving Codebases" will become much more popular, as these companies start to reframe their tools:

Away from "This is how an engineer can build and ship software"
Towards "This is how your whole engineering team builds and ships software"

By the end of 2027...

I) Codex, Cursor, and Claude Code launch built-in "Code Maintenance" tools. They already have "PR Review" - the next step looks like:

Built-In Team-Wide Memory (Improving the harness based on engineer feedback)
Code Style Guide Management (GUI-version of .cursorrules and Skills)
Some form of "Code Quality Monitoring" (consistency, complexity, ...)
Some form of "Engineering Velocity Analytics"
Automation built around the above (similar to "Dependabot" PRs)

II) Codex, Cursor, and Claude Code launch built-in Task Tracking (a-la Linear, JIRA). This is where work starts, it makes sense for it to become located in-app. (I wouldn't be surprised to see some acquisitions to kick-this-off).

III) Codex, Cursor, and Claude Code launch "Managed Infrastructure" - they'll handle the deployment and hosting. They'll tie in observability and error-monitoring capabilities. Imagine tools like "auto-fix any production errors". It probably starts by looking very similar to an "AI App Builder".

IV) One of Codex/Cursor/Claude Code launches a Github competitor, with some marketplace aspect (eg. "Apps" for managing your codebase and infrastructure).