a sneak preview behind an embedded software factory. I suspect rapid application dev is back
March 12, 2026
Latent Patterns builds Latent patterns. I’ve taken some of the ideas behind “The Weaving Loom” and inverted them, put them into the product itself and have perhaps accidentally created a better Lovable.
It’s interesting because I see all these developer tooling companies building for the persona of developers, but to me, that persona no longer exists. You see, within latent patterns, the product (latent patterns) is now the IDE.
If I want to make a change to something, I pop on designer mode, and this allows me to develop LP in LP. I can make changes to the copy or completely change the application’s functionality using the designer substrate directly from within the product, then click the launch agent to ship.
Geoff Huntley, who is very much the forefront of exploring the deeper impact of agentic coding systems on software engineering practice, thinks that
[he] might retire most developer practices, including CI/CD.
I think he’s on to something. I think all the practices of software engineering that we have developed over the last nearly 60 years, let’s say since the software engineering crisis of the late 60s, are now contingent. And it doesn’t mean they’re wrong, but we need to recognise that they emerged in a certain environment where certain things were scarce. There was a high coordination cost of having multiple people working on the same code base. and that as agentic systems become increasingly capable, those costs shifts and so the practices we develop to manage them need to be reconsidered.
I’ll actually go a step further. I think Geoff isn’t, perhaps, sufficiently ambitious here because he still imagines a world of software, of applications. And I have a growing inclination that where we’re going we won’t need applications.
