It's so natural for a software engineer to want to build their own software factory. But I would implore you to abandon that idea immediately. I'd argue it's the last thing you should spend time on, unless it's for work, at least for now.
The tough pill to swallow is that we've entered an era where everyday non-devs are applying AI in mind blowing ways and you still haven't built shit. Many of these ideas are just demos on X, but that's still better than just a system for building software.
I can see why you'd want to build one though. It's close to what you've always been good at, and it feels good to stay in your comfort zone.
It's also the first thing that naturally comes to mind: if I can build this factory, I can build more side projects and eventually quit my job! But a software factory is just an extension of what you've always done: start projects, give up on them and go back to work on Monday.
I'm not saying you should stop exploring and building side projects. I'm just saying you should stop wasting time on your factory. Just type into the chat box and see what happens.
Having AI build your app doesn't take away all the frustration. The frustration is just different: miscommunication, building the wrong thing, building the thing you thought you wanted and getting it wrong, etc.
That's all part of the building process. It's also why you like feature-free rewrites to begin with, because you already know what the end result is. When you build a real product, the end result is nuanced and there is no end.
I still think you should learn how tools like Grok Bot or Claude work. They are amazing. Maybe you shouldn't, idk, but I am. At the very least, learning how they work has stopped me from trying to build another factory.
The frontier labs are working on both models and products, and the models get better based on the user's experience of a product. The labs' number one goal is to remove friction and let you build cool stuff. I'm having a hard time competing with that. Why would I even want to?
If you're still convinced you should build a software factory and think I'm an idiot, it better be for work. Your job is the most realistic scenario you can be in when it comes to automating away your job. You understand the system deeply (or should), and it has humans, timelines and years-old messy systems.
You probably have 12 different patterns for writing the same feature and 100 different edge cases. That's exactly why building one at work would be useful. The challenge is a much harder one, but so is the reward.
You've now empowered an entire team of product managers and designers to ship features with little friction and high trust. From there, your job is to maintain that platform or even apply your other skillset to other parts of the business.
If you can't come up with something to build besides a software factory, you're not the only one. This is actually a very hard task, and it's a muscle that needs to be developed just like anything else.
Take a look around you. Start writing down your problems. Start writing down ideas. Let your mind wander. If you write down 3 ideas every day, the first 30 ideas are going to be so silly and useless, but I guarantee that will start to change as your brain starts to think differently.
Did you see that guy who de-slopped his parent's Android TV using Claude? That's nuts. He saw a problem and used Claude to come up with a solution.
What about the guy who put that fruit fly brain into the real world, where it's been flying around? How does someone even begin to come up with stuff like this? I don't know, but I'll eventually get there myself through experimentation and letting my mind wander.
Anyway, don't build a software factory.