Had to read that sentence a couple of times -- what does it even mean? It's possible Verge may have butchered it

The quote actually appears to be recited from an earlier Verge article [0]:

> Parikh, who transformed Facebook engineering teams, now leads a transformation that he describes as building an AI “agent factory” for Microsoft’s customers.

> ”I described this agent factory idea to Bill [Gates], not knowing that he and Paul [Allen] described Microsoft 50 years ago as the software factory,” Parikh says. “Just like how Bill had this idea of Microsoft being a bunch of software developers building a bunch of software, I want our platform, for any enterprise or any organization, to be able to be the thing they turn into their own agent factory.”

[0] https://www.theverge.com/notepad-microsoft-newsletter/672598...

It means that Microsoft used to be a software company and it is now supposed to become a software factory company, meaning that it produces factories (=agents) that produce software. That seems like a good goal to have for them.

No. Jay is an idiot.

And the prompt engineers running the agents will be sitting in Bangalore. Or perhaps outsourced to Infosys.

Microsoft under Gates at least produced real things. I wonder when Apple gets an Indian CEO to facilitate outsourcing.

It was the American CEO Tim Cook which spent some $250 billion investing in training in China, which is more than the Marshall plan (inflation adjusted) or the CHIPS act, for outsourcing the factories to China in which their products get produced.

But that $250 billion gave them $3T in market cap, so it was a fantastic investment.

That sounds horrible. Who wants that??

Someone who expect to make a lot of money selling said Agents.

It sounds like the kind of plan which would come from the Xbox division.

evidence of severely advanced brain rot

Let's think about MicroSoft back in the 90s. There are no agent factories, whatever they are, but non-programmers are using Visual Basic, Excel, and Access to write their own software. Maybe throw in some ASP as well. (What if ClippyGPT had been available back in the day?) So thinking about that, if you ignore the buzzwords and squint, it kind of looks familiar.

Of course, none of this has anything to do with GitHub. Will they ~~agentify~~ enshittify Visual Source Safe as well?