Stop building Foxconn factories for your agents
Garry Tan reflects on his experience building a 540,000-line Rails app, using the Foxconn factory as a metaphor for the dominant AI agent development pattern: wrapping hyper-intelligent models in mountains of code, tests, and guardrails. He argues the economics have inverted—model calls are now cheap and the models are smarter, making the old instinct to ration and control them obsolete. The new paradigm is 'just-in-time software' and 'skill packs,' where lean markdown instructions and minimal TypeScript replace bloated engineering frameworks. A concrete example shows a hackathon judge agent built in an afternoon, doing what previously required a full software project. The essay challenges engineers to abandon the 2013 mental model of measuring capability by lines of code and to embrace 'tokenmaxxing' to gain a 2-3 year competitive advantage. It is aimed at engineers who are coding with AI but still trapped by traditional software metrics and mistrustful architectures.