In the loop, not in the dark: staying in control in the era of dark software factories

Last year I built Backlog.md, an open source tool that captures your intent, splits it into small markdown tasks, and lets you follow your agents' progress on a TUI Kanban board. A year and 300,000 agent-written lines later, my projects had quietly turned into a small dark factory: software getting built with nobody really reviewing it. Task tracking told me what the agents did, but not what my system had become. I am no longer the owner of my code.

Today I am building Groma.md to fix this. Groma keeps a real-time architectural blueprint of your project's domain as the source of truth, and tasks become the means to reach the blueprint's next iteration. Imagine UML without the fear that it goes stale, where you can watch exactly which parts of the system your agents are modifying.

Whether you are adding an order management system to a brownfield codebase or starting a new project from scratch, you design it in Groma and let the agents write the code, while you keep an eye on the overall architecture and stay in control of the meaningful decisions.

In this talk I will take a large open source repository and map it into a Groma blueprint live on stage, to show you how to become the owner of your code again.