Building the Agentic Software Factory
Scaling reliable AI coding practices from individual developers to teams
The book is for engineers, tech leads and engineering managers who want more from agents than a fast first draft. Benedikt Stemmildt wrote it with Alex Merced.
It covers the system around the agent: context engineering, machine-readable specs that constrain the agent, AI-TDD, and a maturity model for how much autonomy a task deserves. The later chapters widen the view from one developer to the whole team: the code review crisis, measuring beyond vanity metrics, what agents do to Scrum's rituals, and rolling out in phases.
Packt, 10 November 2026. Foreword by Daniel Jones, Chief of AI Engineering at AND Digital.
View the book on Amazon (opens in a new tab)About the authors
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Alex Merced (opens in a new tab)
Data engineering author, early adopter of coding agents
Alex Merced is a passionate technologist, educator, and the Head of Developer Relations at Dremio. With a proven track record of demystifying complex technical ecosystems, Alex is the author of several definitive guides on data engineering, including books on Apache Iceberg and Apache Polaris. Before diving into full-stack development and teaching at General Assembly, he spent over a decade as a financial trainer in NYC. Today, as an early adopter of autonomous coding agents and prompt-driven development, he speaks globally at conferences like Data Council and hosts popular tech podcasts. Alex is dedicated to exploring and documenting how AI is reshaping software architecture and team velocity.
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Founder & Co-CEO
Benedikt Stemmildt is Founder & Co-CEO of hackers&wizards in Hamburg, which runs AI training and mentoring in agentic engineering for engineering and product teams, so that the speed they gain shows up for their customers. He has been a technologist since he was a kid, and for twenty years one thing has driven him: developers in flow, building great products. He co-wrote Building the Agentic Software Factory with Alex Merced (Packt), hosts the Rethink Engineering podcast, is program chair of code.talks and curates CASE Berlin. Before that he worked as an engineer, architect and CIO at OTTO, Breuninger and BLUME2000.