What a dark factory is — and how it differs from a harness

The term comes from "lights-out" manufacturing — a plant that runs with no humans on
the floor, the canonical example being a robotics maker whose robots build robots.
Applied to software, a dark factory is a pipeline that plans, writes, tests, and
ships code with no human reviewing a single line on the path to production. Students
learn the one precise distinction that separates it from the agent harness of EB-2:
the harness keeps a human review step before deployment; the dark factory removes
it. The defining characteristic is the absence of human code review in the
deployment path — everything downstream of merge is unchanged. The phrase is often
used loosely, so the module insists on this precision.