A dark factory can ship code. It cannot ship the judgment that knew the code was right.
-There is a thing a senior engineer knows that a junior engineer does not. It is not the language. It is not the framework. It is the syntax of the patterns. It is the shape of the right answer before the answer exists. The senior engineer looks at a function and says, in seconds, "this is the wrong shape." The junior engineer spends days on the same function, writes the same wrong answer, runs the tests, and ships it. The tests pass. The code is fine. The shape is wrong. The shape is what costs the team.
-That is taste. Taste is the human judgment that knows the right shape of a system before it exists.