One night of a local factory: six PRs ready, 36 runs rejected, and 20 Telegram pings for a decision
Rinaldo Festa's overnight factory on two DGX Sparks shipped six PRs at zero marginal cost, but rejections outnumbered deliveries six to one, and the worst offender was a three-day-old gate he wrote himself.
Rinaldo Festa runs a local software factory that takes leftover Linear tasks at night, plans them, builds them, has a model from a different family review the change against a versioned rubric, and opens a GitHub PR. A deterministic program owns the sequence; agents are single calls that return structured results. It runs on two NVIDIA DGX Spark boxes with a local model, so a night of work costs electricity. Gates (tests, lint, type checks, plus his own rules against weakened tests, out-of-plan files, and protected paths) have the final say.
On the night of 19 October it ran about ten hours on two repositories. It left 6 PRs ready for review. Its gates rejected 36 runs. Automatic triage handled 17 of those by rewriting the task or opening a repair task, and 20 reached him on Telegram because a decision was his.
Why it matters for code review
The overnight output is real, but the cost moved from compute to the person: "Zero marginal cost moved the queue to me." The biggest cause of rejections wasn't the model. It was a three-day-old rule requiring the plan to name a test file matching a pattern the repository didn't follow, so correct work kept bouncing. Other causes: a reviewer and builder disagreeing with reasons and no path to settle it, fragile baseline tests charging the factory for the repo's own debt, and two tasks with contradictory acceptance criteria. By his reading, a better model would have fixed at most one of the five causes.
His next step is to loosen the gates rather than tighten them. The development branch would promise only that it builds, passes tests, and deploys to staging, with the factory reverting on its own when it breaks. Most other rules become notes attached to the PR, and he'd only be interrupted for changes to the spec. He's candid that none of this is settled. Read beside Kiln's factory, where the human yes became the queue.