Most agent teams let the author check their own work. We banned it. Our dark factory is three seats in one Band room: a lead that coordinates, an implementer that writes every line, and a reviewer that is the only seat allowed to test. The implementer builds from the spec and never runs a single check, so every defect has to survive an independent reviewer who measures it, reproduces it and rejects it in the open. We pointed it at Pocketful, a wallet and payments service. After two dispatches and nothing else from a human, it delivered all four stages, each in its own buildable folder, passing the shipped checks in isolated mode. Six rejections changed the code. The best one: every shipped check was green when the reviewer's own tests showed that a new sign-up overwrote a seeded user and the wallets stopped adding up. No shipped check would have found it. Every rule in the factory comes from a recorded run: 18 of them, one shared monitor, append-only raw data. The whole four-stage run cost about 4.5 USD at list prices. What failed is documented too. The mandates are generic, so another team can aim the same factory at a different problem using FACTORY.md and the mandates folder.
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