Dark Factory — the band that refuses its own work

Dark Factory is a software factory built in BAND Desktop: three coding-agent seats in one room, coordinating through @mention routing, building a wallet and payments service against a written specification. THE DESIGN DECISION Grading here is literal and automated: exact field names, exact status codes. One mistyped attribute scores nothing. So the advantage is not implementing faster; it is refusing to hand off anything that does not conform. Two of the three seats are forbidden from writing production code: a coordinator who plans and holds the gate, an implementer, and a reviewer who checks conformance against the spec text, never against the implementer's report. All three run the same harness and model — OpenCode on Featherless, GLM-5.2 — so nothing comes from giving a role a better model. The only difference is the mandate file, loaded as that seat's system prompt. WHAT IT CAUGHT Before any code existed, the reviewer turned the specification into a 158-item checklist, derived from the spec text only, never from the shipped tests, which are a sample that would encode its own blind spots as the requirement. Then one seat corrected another: the coordinator ruled that an empty request body means an empty object; the reviewer confirmed it and rejected it as incomplete, because the stored body must be that empty object too, or a legitimate retry reads as a key reuse — a money bug, caught before a line was written. WHAT IT MISSED We stopped the reviewer partway to conserve budget. Two defects shipped past the seats, one of them making login impossible after an import. The owner caught both at the gate. MEASURED 3h49m, 451 messages, 11,743,469 tokens, $11.70 of a $25 credit, 147 of 147 shipped checks. Input outweighed output 54 to 1: a seat re-reads the whole room every turn, so a factory costs what its own history costs. THE DELETE TEST Take BAND out and this factory does not degrade. It disappears — the rejection has no channel.