# Thoughts, by Nicolas Dao

> What I think about building software in the agentic era: what changed in my own work, what I'd bet on, and what I'd skip. First-hand, opinionated, and with the evidence beside the opinion.

- Written by Nicolas Dao, founder of Cloudless Labs (Sydney)
- Web page: https://cloudlesslabs.com/thoughts/
- RSS: https://cloudlesslabs.com/thoughts/feed.xml

## Every post, newest first

- [Verifiability is your next AI investment. TDD is just the start.](https://cloudlesslabs.com/thoughts/economics-of-verification/index.md), 12 November 2026 (Agentic engineering, Developer tools): Tests used to slow you down. Now they're the only thing that can speed you up, for two reasons. They got cheap: agents write and run them for you. And they got valuable: your agents can write more code than you'll ever read, so the limit isn't the code any more. It's how much of it you can trust, and only verification raises that ceiling.
- [Stop building software. Build the software factory that builds it.](https://cloudlesslabs.com/thoughts/software-factory-philosophy/index.md), 11 November 2026 (Agentic engineering, Developer tools): A software factory is the environment you build for your coding agents. For me, it's the new software development lifecycle, automated and constrained, from the moment a request arrives until its business outcome is met. Here's how Matt Pocock, Lauren Tan and StrongDM define it, and how I'm building mine.
- [I haven't opened my code editor in three months. I don't miss it.](https://cloudlesslabs.com/thoughts/three-months-without-my-code-editor/index.md), 11 November 2026 (Agentic engineering, Developer tools, Industry): I haven't opened Sublime Text in about three months, since my coding agents moved to a server. I review outcomes now, not code. My bet: editors die, VS Code included, and Microsoft is asleep.

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